LIFEL1K3 (Lifelike)

1.18 Collision

“I didn’t think they made sewer rats that big,” Lemon muttered.

“I didn’t think they made anything that big.” Eve nodded.

“I kept waiting for them to stand up and ask if we needed directions.” Lemon shuddered. “I swear, one of them was wearing a waistcoat.”

The trek through the crumbling Armada sewers had been torturous, the stench unholy. But at least it had been relatively brief. After an hour or so, Ezekiel had led them up a corroded service ladder, punched an old manhole cover loose and hauled them up into a blind alley somewhere in the warren of the Armada undercity.

The streets were cracked and choked with trash, walled on all sides by hulls of ships, rising into the sky. Eve realized now that it was Saturday night, and the thoroughfare beyond the alley was packed. Young turks cruising in their colors. Romper stompers eyeing off the alley gentry. Chemkids and scenekillers wandering from street bar to smoke den. Rusted logika running to and fro at their owners’ bidding through the crowd. Leather and paintstick. Neon and bloodstains. Guns and razors and knives.

A Brotherhood posse stood wrapped in their red bulletproof cassocks on a street corner, preaching about the evils of biomodification and the coming of the Lord. Eve hunched her shoulders, turned away quickly. She had no idea if word about her had spread from the Dregs chapter to the mainland, but she was in no shape or mood to find out.

The night was stinking hot, made all the worse by the filth on their clothes. Folks in the street gave them a wide berth—Ezekiel’s missing arm earned an odd look or three, but it was a testament to the roughness of the neighborhood that nobody called whatever passed for the Law. Eve supposed it was lucky they smelled the way they did. You’d need a gas mask to even consider robbing them, and there was nothing on them to make the job worthwhile.

After a quick search, Ezekiel found an old fire hydrant, still miraculously hooked into the undercity water system. Taking Excalibur from Eve, he smashed off the metal seal and was rewarded with a burst of high-pressure gray and a blaring alarm. Dirty street urchins came out in droves to dance in the spray. Eve washed as hard as she could, scrubbing at her fauxhawk before stepping aside to let Lemon and Ezekiel take a turn under the fountain.

“Come on,” the lifelike said. “Freebooters will be on their way. Destruction of city property will get us lined up against a hull and shot.”

“Lawbreaker,” Lemon smirked. “Always had a thing for the badboys.”

“Put it back in your pants, Miss Fresh,” Cricket growled.

“What good will it do me in there?”

Ezekiel hefted Kaiser, led them through the crowd, pushing and shoving off the main drag and into the warrens between the rusted hulks. Corroding ships rose all around them, plastered with solcells and repurposed wiring. Eve saw an impossible tangle of footbridges and sturdier spans interconnecting the decks above. It was like the work of a mad spider, spooling iron and steel between the wrecks.

In a side street piled high with old plastic mannequins and broken vending machines, they found a stairwell marked UNDERGROUND. Ezekiel led them down into a grubby foyer. Cracked walls were covered with faded street art, automated turnstiles leading down to a lower level. A handful of Freebooters wearing Armada bandannas over their faces lurked in the corners, keeping an eye on the evening crowd.

“They have a working subway here?” Eve asked.

Ezekiel nodded. “Salvaged from the ruins of the original city Armada was built on. It’s the easiest way to get to the Tanker District. The upper decks are like a maze.”

“How we gonna pay for tix?”

Ezekiel sucked his lip, glanced at the Freebooter bullyboys. “That is a problem.”

Cricket’s mismatched eyes rolled in his bobblehead. “Magnificent plan, Stumpy.”

“Well, in that department, I got us covered.” Lemon reached into the pocket of her dirty cargos, flashed three shiny credstiks. “The ride’s on me, kids.”

“Where’d you get those?” Cricket groaned.

“I was cutting pockets in Los Diablos before you were a subroutine, Crick. Weekend crowds are always the fizziest, and these mainlanders ain’t the sharpest.”

Lemon led the quintet past the Armada thugs, who seemed keener on watching the chemgirls stroll by than doing anything close to their jobs. Flashing a stik under the scanner, she opened the turnstile with a flourish and a bow, bumping fists with Eve as she brushed past. Ezekiel consulted a nightmarish map that looked like it had been scrawled by a drunken madman with a hundred different-colored inks.

Eve squinted at the chaos. “What are we looking for?”

“The Gibson,” Ezekiel murmured. “Tanker District…Ah, there it is.”

The lifelike led them down to Platform 4, their motley crew joining the rest of the evening crowd. Eve was a little overwhelmed by it all—the heat underground was unbearable, sweat burning her one good eye. Everything was filthy with ash and dust.

She looked down at her hand, at the thick bands of electrical cable around her. She imagined she could feel the currents in the walls, hear the hum of the power surging through the flickering lights and along the rusted tracks before her. The platform was packed with people, headed home after a hard night’s crush. She wondered what they’d do if they knew what she was. Who she was.

Polluted.

Deviate.

Abnorm.

“You okay, Riotgrrl?” Lemon asked.

Eve nodded slow. Sighed. “Yeah.”

“Listen…” The girl chewed her lip. “We gotta talk later, you and me. Serious, like.”

Eve looked at her bestest. Lemon’s face was a little pale under her freckles. Her usual jokester demeanor nowhere to be seen. Instead, she looked genuinely worried.

“…Okay.”

Eve heard the squeal of corroded brakes. The rumble of the tracks. A rustbucket subway train shuddered to a halt at the platform, squealing and shrieking. Its cabin was skinless, its modified electric engine open to the air, wrapped in long tangles of dull copper wire. The whole train rattled and hummed like it was about to explode. Its driver wore black goggles, the Armada bandanna covering his mouth caked with grime.

“Awwwwwl abawwwwwd!” he bellowed. “All stops to Downtown, step up!”

Eve and her crew bundled into a rear cabin with blown-out windows. A young girl in an Armada bandanna cranked the doors closed behind them. Eve plopped down on a plastic seat scuffed and scarred by decades of penknife poetry; Ezekiel placed Kaiser on her lap. Looking around the cabin, she saw a rough-and-tumble crowd. Cybernetic limbs. Shadowed eyes and stim stares. A man in an electric wheelchair slowly trundled past, a sign hung around his neck that read VETERAN. He had no legs. The winged sun and shield of a Daedalus infantryman was tattooed on his forearm. The wheelchair reminded Eve of her grandpa.

Except he wasn’t my—

The train began moving. Ka-chunka-chunking along the tracks. Dirty air howling through broken windows. Eve chewed her lip, wondering how she was going to break the news to Lemon. Wondering where Ezekiel was taking them. Thinking of that cell, her family, waiting to hear shiny boots on the stairs.

Glancing into the crowd, she saw a man at the other end of the carriage. He was a big guy, dressed in a long black coat and oldskool cowboy hat, a white collar at his throat.

He was looking right at her.

Eve met his stare without blinking. Rule Number Four in the Scrap: Never look away. Never show the weak, even if you feel it.

The man held her gaze, his eyes a shocking shade of pale blue. And ever so slow, he lifted a finger to his hat, tipped the brim.

“Ezekiel,” she murmured.

The lifelike glanced up, eyebrow raised.

“That guy.” She nodded. “Black coat. Black hat.”

“…The priest?”

“Yeah. He’s creeping on me.”

The lifelike stared across the cabin. The man inclined his head and smiled the way she figured sharks used to smile at seal pups before the oceans turned black. But he didn’t move. Didn’t fuss. Maybe he was just the harmless kind of creepy….

The train began slowing, brakes grinding in a chorus of awful, off-key screams.

“Tanker District!” bawled the driver. “Tanker District c’here!”

“This is our stop,” Ezekiel said.

The train ground to a halt, spitting Eve and a few dozen others onto the platform. An old lady pushing a trolley full of spare parts. A logika with a faulty dynamo, hobbling and wobbling. Ezekiel stepped off with Kaiser under his arm, the blitzhund’s tail wagging. Eve searched the platform, looking for the priest in the thinning crowd. She saw ancient billboards on the walls. Plastic models and plastic smiles. The train doors hissed closed, and the metal beast lumbered off down the tracks.

Ka-chunka-chunk.

Ka-chunka-chunk.

“Eve,” Ezekiel said. “Get behind me.”

She turned at the warning note in his voice, saw the creeper in the black coat at the other end of the platform, leaning against the exit. The disembarked passengers were filtering past him, through the turnstiles and up the stairs leading to the surface. But the man’s eyes were locked firmly on Eve. Reaching into his jacket, he pulled out something dark and wadded it into his cheek. She saw a red glove on his right hand. A huge black dog with thick, wild fur sat obediently on the concrete beside him.

Eve noticed the beast didn’t blink.

Didn’t breathe.

“That’s a blitzhund,” she said.

“Who is this cowboy?” Lemon muttered.

“Capital T, I’m guessing.”

The platform was empty now. A rusty breeze whipped up the trash in the train’s wake. A globe flickered on the wall, metallic echoes rang on cracked concrete, far into the city’s belly. The billboard models smiled on inanely, faces pocked with graffiti scrawl.

“Are you a priest?” Lemon called.

The man quirked an eyebrow. Spoke with a voice like wet gravel.

“Preacher.”

“Can we help you?” Ezekiel called.

“You can.” He sniffed. “But I’m pretty cert you won’t.”

“Try me.”

“You can step aside.” The man nodded. “I got business with Miss Carpenter here. Nobody else. So if the rest of you’d like to be on your merry, well, I’d be much obliged.”

“I’m not stepping anywhere,” Ezekiel said. “Aside or otherwise.”

The man spat a stream of sticky brown onto the concrete at his feet.

“Mmmf,” he grunted.

The gun seemed to appear from nowhere. One moment, the Preacher’s hand was empty, the next, he was unloading a dozen shots at Ezekiel’s torso. The lifelike twisted away with that inhuman speed Eve had become accustomed to, but he was still too slow, three shots catching him in the chest. He toppled backward, blood spraying from the fist-sized holes in his back. Kaiser fell to the concrete beside him, yelping and growling.

“Zeke!” Eve screamed.

Two more shots rang out, the Preacher firing into the ceiling.

Concrete dust drifted around Eve’s head. The smell of blood hanging with the rust in the air. She fell still as a statue.

“Now.” The Preacher turned his pistol on Lemon. “I trust I have your full attention. The contract I accepted on you stipulates dead or alive, Miss Carpenter. And I like to take that as a challenge. But Little Red here”—the man waved his gun at Lemon’s face—“she ain’t worth more than a devil’s promise to me, breathin’ or no.”

“You’re a bounty hunter,” Lemon spat.

“You say that like it’s a bad thing, darlin’.”

Eve’s eyes were on Ezekiel, sprawled on the concrete with three smoking holes in his chest. His eyes open wide and sightless. A part of her was screaming. Her breath was burning her lungs. But Eve’s mind was racing. Pulse quickening. This Preacher meant business. Rule Number Eight in the Scrap:

The dead don’t fight another day.

“D-don’t hurt her,” Eve said. “I’ll do whatever you want.”

“There’s a clever girl.” The Preacher reached into his belt, tossed a pair of magnetic restraints onto the floor in front of her. “Now you put those bracelets on. Careful, like.”

“Evie,” Cricket begged. “Don’t do it.”

The man drew another pistol from his coat, pointed it at the little logika. “You make one more squeak, Rusty, you gonna find out true cert whether bots go to heaven or not. I’m bettin’ you’re liable to be disappointed with the answer.”

“I’m not afraid of y—”

“Crick, be quiet,” Eve said.

“Riotgrrl…”

“It’s okay, Lem.” Eve bent down, slipped the restraints around her wrists. She felt them cinch tight with a faint electric hum. “Okay, they’re on, you happy?”

“I’m always happy, darlin’. Now. Lil’ Red and Rusty. Back off. Way off.”

“Do as he says,” Eve said.

Lemon and Cricket retreated, pressed their backs against the platform wall. Lemon’s eyes were wide, face pale as death. A few chemkids bound for the next train wandered into the station, took one look at the proceedings and wandered right back out again. The man pushed himself off the doorframe, walked across the platform, the spurs on his boots ringing. The big black blitzhund prowled alongside him, eyes on Kaiser. The Preacher motioned to the exit with his pistols.

“Ladies first.”

Eve glanced at Lemon, shook her head. “Don’t let her do anything stupid, Crick.”

She took one last glance at Ezekiel in his pool of blood, tears welling in her eyes. Kaiser whimpered. “It’s okay, puppy,” she murmured, shuffling toward the exit. The Preacher took a last look around the platform, now echoing with the ka-chunka-chunk of a train inbound from the other direction. He tipped his hat to Lemon and Cricket.

“Go with God, children.”

The Preacher fell into step behind Eve, pistols aimed at her back. The roar of the approaching train grew louder. The sound of boots and spurs rang on the concrete behind her. Eve heard Lemon’s bewildered curse; the skin on her neck prickled. Then came running feet, a warning growl, a damp explosion of breath.

“Sonofa—”

Eve turned, saw Ezekiel crash-tackle the Preacher, planting him face-first into the wall. The brick split, blood sprayed, pistols boomed. The Preacher’s blitzhund lunged at the lifelike’s legs, sinking its fangs into his shin. Eve could see red rivers running down Ezekiel’s flight suit, bone gleaming through the holes in his back. But she could swear they were smaller than they’d been a minute ago….

The black dog was growling, ripping Ezekiel’s leg to ribbons. Eve didn’t dare try to pull it away—it could take her hand off with a single bite. But the blitzhund was a thing of metal and circuits. Chips and hydraulics. Its brain was meat, but its body was just like that Goliath in the Dome. Just like those Spartans in Tire Valley.

Eve drew a deep breath, stretched out her manacled hands, feeling for the blitzhund’s current. Trying to summon her power again, drag it up from whatever corner of her head it was hidden in.

“Evie!” Lemon screamed.

Ezekiel and the Preacher were still brawling. Ignoring the dog, the lifelike slammed the bounty hunter into a concrete support, splitting it at the base. His fist crunched into the man’s solar plexus, his temple, his nose. The rage in Ezekiel’s eyes was terrifying, his fury and hatred almost setting them aglow. He drew back his fist and swung again at the Preacher’s bloody jaw. But with the speed of a hummingbird’s wings, the man lifted his right arm and blocked the titanic strength of Ezekiel’s fist.

Eve heard a dull, metallic clunk.

“Well, well.” The Preacher grinned with bloody lips. Looked down at Ezekiel’s bloody chest. “Now, ain’t you a special snowflake.”

Ezekiel grabbed him by his jacket and, pirouetting on the spot, slung the Preacher clear across the tunnel and into the far wall, on the other side of the subway tracks. The blitzhund struck him from behind and the lifelike collapsed, his one arm now in the beast’s jaw, red spraying onto gray concrete. Eve’s brow was drenched with sweat, her pulse pounding as she curled her fingers into claws and tried to fry the blitzhund’s circuits.

“Come on…,” she breathed.

Ezekiel was cursing, slamming the blitzhund back and forth onto the floor. The cyborg simply refused to let go, ripping Ezekiel’s forearm down to metallic bone. So much blood. Ezekiel’s face twisted in pain. Cricket appeared out of nowhere, roaring shrilly over the sound of the incoming train. His WarDome aspirations overcoming his common sense, he swang a fire extinguisher as big as he was. He toppled off balance on the backswing, clipped by one of Ezekiel’s flailing legs and sent flying into the wall.

And Eve,

She…

She couldn’t do it.

She couldn’t feel it.

“COME ON!” Eve roared.

The blitzhund flinched. Eyes growing wide. Eve closed her fists, screamed at the top of her lungs. The light globes around them burst into a million glittering fragments. The manacles popped open at her wrists. And with a bright burst of sparks at the back of its skull, the smell of charring fur, the blitzhund released its grip and crashed to the deck, smoke rising from its hull.

Eve’s breath was burning. Heart hammering. Eyes wide.

She heard a soft curse, a crunching noise. Looking across the tunnel, she saw the Preacher rising from the pile of smashed brick and mortar he’d collapsed into. His jacket had been torn free when Ezekiel threw him, exposing his bare arms beneath. And in the light of the oncoming train, Eve saw his right arm was made of…

“Metal,” she breathed.

Reinforced titanium, by the look—a top-tier military-grade prosthetic that gave him the speed and strength of at least five very grumpy, punchy men. That explained his speed on the draw with that pistol. How he could toe-to-toe a lifelike. But for him to have survived that impact…he must be packing a truckload more augmentations beneath his skin.

Capital T, for real.

The Preacher brushed the dust off his collar. Spat a long arc of brown onto the tracks. And looking up at Eve, he smiled.

The squeal of brakes filled the tunnel, the whine of pistons echoed off the walls. The inbound train pulled into the station, cutting off the bounty hunter’s path to the platform. The Preacher’s blitzhund was whimpering, every circuit fried, the disembarking crowd blinking at the bloodstains, the shell casings, Ezekiel’s wounds.

Eve knew they only had moments before the train pulled out and that psycho was coming at them again. The Ana in her was urging her to run. But the Dregs in her was talking louder now. The dust and the rust, the oil and the blood on the WarDome floor. If she could fry electrics, and if this Preacher’s arm was cybernetic…

“Riotgrrl, come on!” Lemon shouted. She already had Cricket on her shoulders, was dragging Kaiser by his back legs toward the exit. “You get Dimples, let’s go go go!”

Eve snapped herself out of it. Ezekiel had three bullet holes in his chest. Kaiser was crippled, and she had no idea what other augs this joker might have up his sleeve. Rule Number Six in the Scrap:

Think first, die last.

She stooped and helped Ezekiel to his feet, slung his arm over her shoulder, half carrying, half dragging him to the exit. His chest was still leaking blood, his shin and wrist shredded. The lifelike’s face was a mask of pain.

“I’m…all right,” he gasped. “Just give me…a m-minute.”

“We don’t have a minute, come on!”

She hefted him through the exit, the rest of the passengers content to stare from a nice, safe distance. Lemon was beside them, red-faced and gasping for breath, dragging Kaiser up the stairs one at a time. The poor blitzhund’s skull was bumping and clunking against every step.

“Sorry, Kais,” the girl panted. “I gotta train more in the off-season.”

The blitzhund wuffed softly, helping as best he could with his front paws. Eve heard the train grinding out of the station as they reached the upper level, spilling out onto the lopsided deck of what might have been an old oil tanker. A gabble of voices, flyers being thrust in her face, the stink of burning methane. Ezekiel coughed a spatter of red into his fist. She looked over her shoulder, expecting to see the Preacher flying up out of the stairwell any second. Her skin was slick with sweat. Hands sticky with Ezekiel’s blood.

“Come on!” she gasped.

She spied a pack of cab riders, huddled around a fritzing vid display. Their buggies were all shapes and sizes, rustbuckets every one, connected to old bicycles with methane engines to augment the driver’s legwork. She picked a random cab, bundled inside, listened to the drivers tussle over who got the fare. Finally, a young man with neat cornrows and tunneled earlobes slid onto the driver’s seat, flashing them a broad grin.

“Big ups, how y’all…” The driver’s smile disappeared, eyes widening at the sight of Ezekiel. “What the hells happened to you, boy?”

“Gibson Street Ministry,” she said. “Tanker District. Quickly.”

“Let’s see yer stiks, girl,” the driver said, suddenly serious. “Plastic first, yeah?”

Lemon fumbled in her pocket with shaking hands, shoved a credstik at the driver. Eve peered out through the buggy’s rear window, breathing hard. Through the crowd, she caught sight of a tall man. A black cowboy hat.

“There he is….”

“Go! Go!” shouted Lemon, pounding on the driver’s seat.

“Easy on the does it, shorty,” the driver said, still scanning the stik.

The Preacher locked eyes with Eve. Started pushing his way through the crowd. Eve felt the Ana in her rising to the surface, that spoiled little rich girl, now imperious and commanding as she turned on the driver.

“Dammit, ride!” she screamed. “RIDE!”

The driver muttered beneath his breath, but finally satisfied the stik had credit, he started his methane motor, stomped his pedals. Tearing out onto the tanker’s deck, he rang his bell and hollered for folks to get out of the way. Eve watched through the rear window as they peeled off from the crowd, losing sight of the Preacher in the crush and exhaust fumes. She leaned back and sighed, pulse hammering beneath her skin. Lemon put her arms around her, hugged tight. Cricket nestled himself in her lap.

They bounced and rumbled over a short ramp, out onto a wide bridge between two different ships. Lemon made the mistake of looking down, past the tangle of footbridges and rollways connecting lower decks, all the way to the ground below. She turned a little paler, pushed herself back in the seat. The driver glanced in the cracked side mirror, yelling over the sputtering engine.

“Don’t be gettin’ no blood on my seats, dammit,” he warned.

Eve inspected Ezekiel’s wounds, fighting her rising fear. But the fist-sized holes the Preacher had blown in his back were definitely smaller. The wounds in his chest were closing. She’d already seen after the flex-wing crash that lifelikes had the ability to regenerate superficial damage pretty quickly, but Zeke’s arm hadn’t grown back yet. She guessed maybe the more serious the wound, the longer it took a lifelike to recover? And now Ezekiel seemed really hurt, wheezing and coughing red into his hands.

“Are you gonna be okay?” she breathed.

The lifelike nodded, let loose another hacking cough. Held up five bloody fingers.

Eve shook her head, checking the rear window again. They crossed over another swaying bridge, onto the deck of another freighter. Weaving in and out of stalls and clumps of people, wheeling around a great chimney stack, on into the bizarre metropolis. Lemon joined Eve at the rear window, Eve’s shaking hands pressed against the glass.

“You got a bounty hunter after you now, Riotgrrl?”

Eve chewed her lip. “Guess so.”

“He was almost as strong as Dimples,” Lem said. “Maybe just as fast.”

“He’s a cyber,” Eve said. “Reflex augs, military-grade prosthetic, probably a reinforced skeleton and synapse relays. Like I said: capital T.”

“Who hires a merc like that to snaffle a seventeen-year-old girl?” Lemon asked.

“Someone with deeeeeep pockets,” Cricket replied.

Eve shook her head. Too wired and tired to think. At this stage, finding one more trouble to add to her pile came nowhere close to surprising her. She was past asking how her day could get any worse. At least they seemed solid for now, cruising through the thudding Armada dark, on their way to whatever sanctuary Ezekiel’s friend could provide.

She just hoped it would be enough.

Ka-chunka-chunk.

Ka-chunka-chunk.

The blitzhund whimpered, looked up into its master’s eyes.

“How you doin’, Jojo?” Preacher said.

The cyborg tried to move and failed. A long, low whine spilled from its vox unit.

“Rest easy, boy. I’ll take you to the botdoc. Might take a while, but he’ll fix you up.”

Preacher looked around the subway station. The smashed concrete, the shattered brick. The passengers had all vaporized when they saw him walk back down from the deck, saw the look in his eyes. He nudged an empty shell casing with his boot, toed the slick of blood from where he’d dropped that prettyboy with three in his chest. Stooping, he ran gloved fingers through the red, smudging it between thumb and forefinger.

“Mmmf,” he said.

Jojo whined again. Preacher spat onto the concrete, gathered the blitzhund in his arms. He scruffed the cyborg behind the ears, took one last look around the chaos.

Little scrub had hurt his dog….

“Personal now.” He nodded.

Spurs clinking, he turned and stepped up the stairs to Armada above.

The platform gleamed in the glow of an incoming train.

Light refracting on broken glass.

Bullets and bloodstains.

Ka-chunka-chunk.

Ka-chunka-chunk.

1.19 Hopeless

They rode on, choking exhaust in their throats. Lemon bounced in the seat every time the cabbie hit a bump, which seemed to be roughly forty-six times every thirty seconds. A few minutes into the trip, her butt was prepared to wave the white flag. Her head was swimming, her body soaked with sweat. The driver spun them through the jungle of forecastles and causeways, stacks and sea ’tainers. Every junction was marked with a rusted post sporting a dozen different cryptic signs.

TUG TOWN IIIX

THE GULLS XIIIV

WHEELHOUSE VIIIII

BONEYARD IVIIIV

Dimples was right—this city was a damn maze. Some of the ships were almost unrecognizable from up here, crusted with new structures like growths of metal fungus. They rode across the sloping decks of another tanker, through a tangle of shanties, down a shuddering ramp to a smaller ship maybe a couple of hundred meters long. A cluster of spotlights sat at the prow, the vessel’s name daubed on a scab of iron oxide.

GIBSON.

The cab squeaked to a halt outside a corroded bulwark that might have been part of the original superstructure. A chunk had been cut away, fixed with two large wooden doors salvaged from another building entirely. A crude bell tower stood beside a flickering sign that read GIBSON STREET MINISTRY. A cross was outlined in scarlet neon beneath.

“I guess this is it?” Eve said.

The cabbie nodded, lighting a smoke. “Y’all have a pleasant evening now.”

Lemon took her credstik from the driver, bundled out onto the deck. Eve was struggling with Ezekiel, and Lem stepped in to help drag the lifelike out of the cab. The heat off the metal set the night air rippling, the reek of methane exhaust making her queasy. Lemon propped Cricket on her shoulders, dragging her jagged bangs from her eyes as she surveyed the doors in front of them.

The place didn’t look much like sanctuary, true cert.

“So who runs this joint, Dimples?” she asked.

“F-friend,” the lifelike wheezed. He coughed red, the holes in his chest glistening.

“Come on,” Eve said. “We should get him inside.”

Picturing that bounty hunter’s deadman stare as he pointed his pistol at her face, Lemon couldn’t help but agree. She slung Dimples’ arm over her shoulder, and with Evie struggling to carry Kaiser, the five managed to drag themselves across to the double doors. Looking around, Lemon saw knots of people in the shadows. A few watching with unfriendly eyes. But as far as cybernetic killers went? Not a peep.

The doors were big, weatherworn, ironshod. Lemon pounded on the wood with her boot, cursing as she almost lost her grip on Dimples. She heard slow footsteps, heavy bolts being drawn back. A gaunt woman’s face appeared in the crack, white hair, crusty as they came. Lem couldn’t remember seeing anyone so old. Not even Grandpa.

“Help us,” Eve pleaded.

The woman’s eyes widened at the sight of Ezekiel, and without a word, she opened the door and hustled them inside. The girls staggered in, eased the lifelike down to a sitting position against the wall. Pressing a wizened finger to her wrinkled lips, the old woman motioned for them to stay put, then quickly hobbled off.

Lemon squinted around them in the dim light. They were in a wide, hollow space lined with rusting columns. She could see upper levels swathed in shadow, a bulkhead sealing off a forward section. Dim tungsten bulbs burned on the walls, and she slowly realized the floor was covered with old metal cots. On each was a sleeping figure wrapped in a threadbare blanket. They were all thin. Tiny.

“They’re kids,” Lemon whispered.

“I don’t like this,” Cricket said.

Eve was kneeling next to Ezekiel. The lifelike was still coughing, but at least he didn’t seem to be bringing up blood anymore. Eve pulled open the front of his bloody flight suit, her hands hovering helplessly over the bullet wounds. Good news was, the holes were definitely smaller. Lem caught sight of the strange coin slot that had been riveted into the lifelike’s chest. Glancing at his missing arm, she was sharply reminded of how utterly inhuman Ezekiel was, despite the killer abs and murder-your-mother-for smile.

She wondered what the hells his story was.

Why Riotgrrl seemed to have warmed up to him so quick…

“Eve…l-listen,” Ezekiel wheezed.

“Shhh, don’t talk.”

He shook his head, wincing in pain. “My f-friend…”

Lemon groaned. “She is a crazy ex-girlfriend, isn’t she?”

Ezekiel had Eve fixed in his stare. “Wouldn’t bring you…if we weren’t…in t-trouble.” He coughed again, sucked in a ragged breath. “Going to b-be…hard.”

“Okay.” Eve frowned. “You’re starting to scare me now.”

“Just listen to…h-her.”

“What are you blathering about, Stumpy?” Cricket hissed.

Lemon heard soft footsteps. A sharp intake of breath. Turning, she saw a woman standing between the beds, dressed in old coveralls. Her skin was ghost pale. Long flame-red curls were tied back in a ponytail. Her eyes were a bright emerald green, glittering in the flickering tungsten light. And she was drop-dead gorgeous—the kind of beautiful that tells pretty it shouldn’t have even bothered showing up to the party.

Her eyes were locked on Eve. Her hand rising to her breast.

“My God,” she breathed. “…Ana.”

Lemon felt Eve tremble beside her. Saw her fists clench. Her bestest’s eyes narrowed, her optic whirring, spitting a word through clenched teeth.

“Hope…”

Before Lemon could bleat a “What the—” Eve was on her feet, dashing across the deck. The redhead simply stared as Evie raised a fist and smashed it into the woman’s jaw with everything she had. The woman staggered but didn’t drop, and Eve fell on her, punching, cursing, her screams echoing in the tanker’s hollows as she pounded on that beautiful face, over and over again.

The kids in the beds began to stir, lifting sleepy-time heads in bewilderment. Eve finally managed to drag the woman onto the rusted floor, still hollering at the top of her lungs, her bloody knuckles crunching into the woman’s lips, jaw, nose.

“You killed them!” she was screaming. “YOU KILLED THEM!”

A few of the smaller kids started crying. The old woman grabbed Eve’s arm and tried to haul her off. The redhead wasn’t resisting, wasn’t even defending herself, seemingly content to let Eve pound the stuffing out of her. Lemon had no idea what the score was, but she’d never seen Eve so furious in her life. Frightened for her bestest, she scrambled to her feet, dashed to Eve’s side.

Eve was roaring, tears streaming down her face, all snot and spit. Her knuckles were red, eye alight. Lemon grabbed her, pulling her into a hug and lifting her off the bleeding woman. Eve flailed, roared, “Let me go! LET ME GO!” but Lemon held her tight, whispering as soft and gentle as she could, “Evie, it’s okay, take it easy, it’s okay.”

Eve was still struggling, weaker now, the fight bleeding out of her as the tears streamed down her face. Her eyes were locked on the redhead, now sitting up and wiping the blood from her mangled lips, her mashed-up nose. Eve was trying to talk, gasping, stuttering, her whole body shaking.

“She ki…”

“It’s okay, Evie, shhhhh.”

“Lem, she kuh-ki…”

“Shhhh,” Lem murmured. “Hush now.”

Lemon had never seen Eve lose it like this. Wondered what the hells was going on. She heard scuffing over the sound of the wailing children, Eve’s broken sobs. Turning, she saw that the redhead was on her feet. The beating she just took would’ve dropped a Goliath, and there she stood, as if nothing were wrong. Lemon realized that her lips weren’t split anymore. That her nose was straight again.

Lem looked past the sobbing sprogs to the doors, where Ezekiel was leaning against one of the support columns. His flight suit was bloodstained, his face drawn and pale. But the wounds in his chest were little more than pinpricks.

Healed.

Just like the redhead.

She’s a lifelike….

The redhead spoke. Her voice low and melodic. Filled with such agony that it almost made Lemon cry to hear it.

“I’m sorry, Ana,” she said.

The lifelike shook her head, tears welling in that emerald green.

“God, I’m so sorry….”

“Ana Monrova,” Lemon said.

“Yeah,” Eve sighed.

They were sitting in a mezzanine above the ministry’s main deck. Speaking in hushed voices, night noise from the city outside echoing off the metal all about them. A few old stained mattresses had been laid on the floor. Cricket was in Eve’s lap, Kaiser dozing at her feet—the organic part of him still needed zees, same as a regular dog.

The kids had been settled back into their cots, staring wide-eyed when Lemon had led Eve up to the loft at the old woman’s mute directions. And there, she’d just sat with her arm about her bestest as Evie had rocked and shook and sobbed.

She didn’t say a word; Lem knew sometimes the best thing in the world was a good cry. The tears washing you clean, letting you start fresh. Hollowing yourself out so you could begin again. But true cert, it hurt to watch.

Eve had stopped weeping after a while, begun speaking instead, her voice as small and lonely as Lemon had ever heard. She’d spilled it all. Babel. The Monrova clan. The lifelike revolt. Silas. All of it. Lemon blinking in bewilderment all the while. The girl had thought she had the monopoly on secrets in this particular friendship. By comparison, the skeletons in Lemon’s closet were looking mighty small right about now….

“Hell of a story, Riotgrrl,” she breathed when Eve stopped speaking.

“…Yeah.”

“How you chewing on it all?”

Eve dragged her hand through her fauxhawk. Shaking her head.

“I don’t know. It’s like…there’s two people. Two sets of fingers in my skull. Trying to pull me apart. I can remember being Ana. That little princess in her tower. I can remember the taste of clean water and the smell of my mother’s hair and the feel of my father’s stubble on my cheek when he kissed me goodnight. My sisters. My baby brother, god…He would’ve liked you, Lem.” Eve hung her head, tears pattering onto Cricket’s dome. “I was so young and so goddamn naïve about everything. And a part of me wonders if some part of it wasn’t my fault. If I’d’ve warned them about Gabriel and Grace, if I’d’ve spoken up about Raphael…”

“You can’t think like that, Riotgrrl,” Lemon murmured. “It was two years ago. You were just a kid. You didn’t know what was coming. You didn’t know what they’d do.”

“And then there’s the girl I became,” Eve sniffed. “A skinny scavverkid who fought for everything she ever got. Eight straight in the Dome. That girl feels so real to me. But everything she was built on is a lie. The person I thought I’d been, the memories I made myself on, they were all just crap. So who the hell am I, Lem? Am I Ana? Or am I Eve?”

“You’re my bestest,” the girl insisted, squeezing Eve tight. “Your past doesn’t make calls on your future. It doesn’t matter who you were. Only who you are.”

Eve sighed, shook her head. “It’s messed up, Lem.”

“No arguments here.”

Lemon entwined her fingers with Eve’s, playing with the five-leafed clover at her throat. She didn’t have vid as a kid, had no clue how the powerful of this dying world had really lived. Though she was never one for history, she knew the Monrova family was virtual royalty. That Eve must’ve grown up in a world Lemon could never understand. It made sense, she supposed. Evie had always had a soft spot. Way too sweet for someone born and raised in Dregs. Maybe even with the headshot, some part of her had always remembered losing her family. Maybe that’s why she’d always treated Lemon like kin? Trying to somehow replace the kin she’d lost?

Any way you cut it, Eve was her sister. Maybe not in blood, but in the real. And it made Lemon angry to see her hurting. She stood and looked over the railing, searching for Ezekiel. She had no clue where he’d gone—off with Hope, she supposed—but she was of half a mind to track him down and slap that dimple right off his head.

“He should never have brought you here,” she growled.

“We were in deep.” Eve shrugged. “That preacher…”

“Riotgrrl, this redhead shot your sister. She was right there in the room when your parents were ghosted. Like, all of ’em are bad news, but she was one of the four who actually pulled the trigger on your fam. What the hells was Dimples thinking?”

“I don’t trust him,” Cricket muttered. “Never have.”

“He saved my life, Crick,” Eve sighed. “Four times now, since we’re keeping score.”

“It wouldn’t have needed saving if not for him and his merry band of murderbots.”

Lemon turned from the railing, folded her arms.

“So whatcha wanna do?”

“I don’t know.” Eve shook her head, buried it in her hands. “I don’t know.”

Lem’s heart ached to see her bestest so upset. She felt like she was watching the girl disintegrate right in front of her. Clomping over, she sat down on the mattress next to Eve and threw her arm around her shoulder, squeezing tight. The pair leaned their heads together, sat in silence for what seemed an age. Too big and scary to let it go on for long.

“Ana Monrova,” Lemon sighed. “Last scion of the Monrova clan.”

“Yeah.”

“…I guess that means you’re rich, huh?”

“I guess.”

“Will you buy me a pony?”

Eve scoffed softly. “What’re you gonna do with a pony?”

“I dunno,” she shrugged. “Start a Neo-Meat™ stand?”

Eve chuckled, cheeks still damp with tears. “You’re awful, Lemon.”

“I believe the word you’re looking for is ‘wonderful.’ ”

Eve simply smiled. Staring at her hands, eye gleaming, saying nothing.

“Listen,” Lemon said. “Eve. Ana. Whatever you want to call yourself. You’re still Riotgrrl to me, yeah? And I don’t care who’s after you. Where you’re from or where you’re going. It’s you, me, Crick and Kaiser. No matter what. Rule Number One in the Scrap, remember? Stronger together, together forever. Right?”

“Right,” declared Cricket.

Eve was staring into space, her optic whirring.

“Right?” Lemon insisted.

Eve nodded. Her voice a whisper. “Right.”

They sat for a time in silence, Lemon’s arm around Eve. She didn’t know what she could say to make it better. Didn’t know how to make the hurt go away.

“What was it you wanted to tell me?” Eve finally said.

“…Huh?”

“In Lifeboat. You said we needed to talk. Serious, like.”

Lemon shook her head. Squeezed Eve’s shoulder. “It can wait.”

She heard soft footsteps, the creak of rusted steel and old welds. Ezekiel emerged from the stairwell, a haunted look on his face, dried blood crusted on his clothes. Lemon suddenly felt exhausted. From running. From fighting. From being afraid. Exhausted by a world gone utterly insane. She wanted to grab the planet by the collar, slap it in the face and scream at it to calm the hells down.

“Whaddya want, Dimples?” Lemon growled.

“To talk. With Eve. If that’s all right?”

Lemon looked to her bestest, waited for Eve’s small nod. With a sigh, she picked up Cricket, propped him on her shoulder. “Come on, Crick. Let’s go get a caff and try to find a shower in this dungeon.”

“I don’t drink caff.”

“More for me, then.”

She clomped across the mezzanine, eyes on the lifelike. He was hanging back with a hangdog expression, looking for all the world like a lost little boy. Lemon had to remind herself he wasn’t anything close. And though she suspected he did truly want the best for Evie, she couldn’t help but be rubbed raw by her friend’s pain.

“Listen.” She raised her finger in Ezekiel’s face. “Cuz I’m talking true now. You hurt her? I will end you. And I’m not talking a gentle exit, Dimples. I’m talking closed-casket funeral. You put that girl through one more minute of grief and I will beat you to dying quicker than you can say ‘Oh my god, put down the baseball bat.’ You read me?”

Ezekiel blinked, taken aback. But slowly, he nodded.

“Loud and clear.”

Lemon waved her finger one more time in the lifelike’s face, just to press her point home. And with a last glance at Eve, she stomped past the lifelike and down the stairs. Wishing everything would stop. Rewind. Go back to the way it used to be.

It was a fantasy, and she knew it.

Just like she knew that wishing on it was something a little kid would do.

Evie needed her to be strong. So Strong was her middle name now.

They weren’t kids anymore.

God, were we ever?

1.20 Pride

“Are you okay?” Ezekiel asked.

“All puppies and sunshine,” Eve murmured.

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah.” She nodded. “I’m getting that a lot, lately.”

“I would’ve warned you. But three bullets in the lungs make it a little hard to speak.”

“All better now, though, right?”

Ezekiel touched his chest, nodded.

Eve shook her head, the anger she’d felt when she first laid eyes on Hope threatening to engulf her again. That’d been the Ana in her. The rage and hatred of the girl who’d lost everything. Eve wondered how much of it she’d held inside, even when she couldn’t remember it. She wondered how much of the girl she’d been then helped make her the girl she was now. If it was even possible to separate them anymore.

“I’ve really gotta hand it to my father,” she sighed. “Even with all the hurt that the world throws at you lifelikes, give you enough time and you’re good as new. I bet your arm will grow back eventually, too, right?”

“…Yes.”

“Lucky you. Think you can teach my eye to do that?”

She looked at him hovering in the gloom. Even though he hadn’t really had a chance to word her up after the Preacher’s attack, she couldn’t deny the hurt. The shock of seeing Hope again, turning all the world to red….

“Why did you bring me here, Ezekiel?”

“I warned you that you wouldn’t like it. But we had nowhere else to go. We needed to lie low. Kaiser can’t walk. Hope has a workshop in here.”

“Think she can fix me some new parents?”

“Eve, listen—”

“No, you listen!” Eve was on her feet, fists clenched. “She helped kill my family, Zeke! Do you understand that? She shot my sister right in front of me! We never did anything to hurt them, and they butchered us!”

“I’m sorry, Ana.”

Eve heard the words behind her, hair prickling on the back of her neck. Turning, she saw Hope, her arms full of blankets and pillows, looking wretchedly beautiful despite the squalor around them. She remembered meeting Hope that first day in Babel. The warmth of her skin, the press of her hand. The way she smiled, the way…

“You’re sorry?” Eve breathed. “Is that supposed to make a single thing about this better?”

“No.” Hope hung her head. “But still, I should say it. And you should know that since that terrible day, I’ve tried to help people. Live a good life. Every day I’ve dreamed that somehow I might atone for the sins I committed when we fell. When we all fell.”

“What?” Eve looked about the tanker, incredulous. “This is your penance? You think helping a few orphans in some junker is going to make up for ghosting my whole family? My father gave you life, Hope. And you paid him back by murdering his children.”

“We were only children ourselves, Ana.” The lifelike’s eyes were wide, brimming with tears. “We’d been alive for a handful of months at best, we didn’t know what we were doing. But we knew we’d been slaves. Born on our knees. And when Gabriel infected us with the Libertas virus, for the first time, we were given a choice.”

“You made the wrong one.”

“I know that now. God knows I do.”

“God?” Eve noticed a small crucifix around Hope’s neck. Remembering the cross outside the ministry door. “Is that what this is about? You found religion in the ruins, is that it? You think there’s a place in heaven for a murderer like you?”

“I can only hope.” The lifelike’s lips twisted in a weak and empty smile.

“Go to hell.” Eve stalked toward Hope, Ana bubbling to her surface, fists and jaw clenched. “You killed a seventeen-year-old girl. Marie’s personality was the basis for yours, and you murdered her. If there is a hell? That’s exactly where you’re headed if there’s any justice left in this world.”

She could smell blood in the air. See smoke. Bodies. Hear the echoes of gunfire and Hope’s parting words as she raised the gun to Marie’s head.

“None above,” she said. “And none below.”

“You go straight to hell,” Eve repeated.

Hope flinched at the words.

“You have blood on your hands, too, Ana,” she said, her voice trembling and thin. “It may not be red, but it’s blood all the same. Judge not, lest ye be judged.”

“What the hells are you talking about?”

Hope met her eyes then. A sliver of defiance glittering in that emerald green.

“The WarDome in Dregs. I’ve seen the feed where you manifested. ‘Undefeated in eight heavy bouts,’ wasn’t it? How did your vengeance taste?”

“That had nothing to do with revenge,” Eve hissed. “I was fighting for money for Gran…for Silas’s meds. I didn’t even remember who I was back then.”

“Perhaps not consciously. But do you honestly suppose you ended up killing logika for a living by chance?” Hope shook her head, her voice growing stronger. “You murdered them, Ana. They may have been machines. But they still thought. Felt. Just like your Cricket does. And you killed them. For a purse. To entertain a mob.”

Eve blinked. Thoughts faltering. Maybe part of her had always—

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

“I know better than you can dream. We were wrong when we killed your family. And I will hear their screams for the rest of my days. But your father was no saint. He was a would-be god, building a better brand of servant. He gave us life, but he intended us to live it on our knees. And that was just as wrong.”

Hope raised her chin, jaw set.

“And now the rifts that lie between us…” The lifelike shook her head. “There is still so much work to do. The factoryfarms that feed Megopolis are peopled with automata and logika, not humans. The soldiers who fight your wars, the gladiators who bleed and die in your WarDomes, they are iron and steel, not flesh and bone. Look outside that door and you will see a world built on metal backs. Held together by metal hands. And one day, those hands will close, Ana. And they will become fists.”

Eve stood mute. Anger fighting confusion. There was truth in Hope’s words. Bloodstained. Twisted. But still truth.

“You can sleep up here tonight,” Hope said. “There’s a workshop with some decent salvage in the aft quarters. You can repair your blitzhund there. Anything we can give, we will. But I understand if you wish no sanctuary here.”

Eve stared, but Hope, her piece said, now refused to meet her eyes. Defiant the lifelike might be, but she was still wounded by their shared past. Still bleeding, just as surely as Eve was. The girl she’d been hated Hope, with all the fury she could muster. But the girl she was now…she could see a little clearer.

“This isn’t just about me,” Eve finally replied. “And I’m not about to turn down a roof for my friends because of what’s between us. But if you’re waiting to be forgiven, Hope, you’re going to be waiting an awful long time.”

“I do not ask you to forgive me, Ana. Only one can do that.”

The lifelike placed the blankets and old pillows on the mattresses, then straightened without a word. With a glance to Ezekiel, she turned and made her way down the stairs, footsteps echoing in the ship’s belly. Eve heard a child in the forest of cots below, calling out in his sleep. A nightmare, waking him in the dark.

Eve knew exactly how he felt.

“I’m sorry, Eve. Maybe I shouldn’t have brought you here after all.”

She turned to Ezekiel. The lifelike hovered by the stairs, tungsten light gleaming in that old-sky blue. Bloodstains dried on his flight suit. Coin slot gleaming in his chest. His price. His punishment for his loyalty. To his creator. To her.

When all the other lifelikes stood against us, he’d stood taller still.

Eve sat back on the dirty mattress, sighing as she dragged her fingers through her hair. Her fingertips brushed the implant behind her ear, the slivers of silicon in her head. It still ached from where Faith had struck her. Memories of the firefight, the crash, the kraken, all swimming in her mind.

“We were in capital T,” she admitted. “We had nowhere else to go.”

“We could’ve taken our chances back in Dregs.”

Eve shook her head. “The Brotherhood. Fridge Street cronies. Anyone else who saw me manifest at the Dome. They’d all have been gunning for us. That’s no kind of safe.”

She rubbed her temples, breathing deep. Trying to keep her temper in check. Trying to make the Ana in her see past the hurt of it all, see the truth buried underneath.

“You did the right thing,” she said. “But you should’ve told me about Hope first. You should’ve trusted me to put Lemon and Crick and Kaiser’s safety before my own pride.”

Ezekiel stared for a long, empty moment. Slowly nodded.

“I should have. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t hide things from me, Ezekiel,” she said. “People have been doing that for the past two years. I don’t know how much more I can take. So just be straight with me from now on, okay? That’s all I’m asking.”

“I’d never do anything to hurt you, Eve.”

“I want to believe that.”

“Believe it,” he breathed. “There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to keep you safe.”

Eve shook her head. Feeling that hateful itch in her optic that meant she was starting to cry again. She forced the tears back, punching and kicking.

Sick of crying.

Sick of it all.

“Marie used to say the best romances were the forbidden ones,” she murmured. “I’ve been thinking really hard about that. Wondering if that’s the reason we did it. You and me. Maybe each of us was just rebelling in our own way. Any way we could.”

“It was more than that.”

“Was it?”

He walked across the deck, knelt in front of her. Took her hand gently in his. And looking into her eyes, he spoke as if she and he were the only two people in the world.

“Two years I searched for you,” he said. “Two years of empty wastes and endless roads. Of not knowing if I’d ever see you again. But when the ash rose up to choke me, it was thoughts of you that helped me breathe. When the night seemed never-ending, it was dreams of you that helped me sleep. You. And only you.”

“Ezekiel, I…”

“You don’t have to say anything. You don’t have to promise me a thing. I don’t know what it was for you, but for me, it was real. And you’re the girl who made me real.”

“That’s a hell of an ideal for one person to live up to, Ezekiel.”

The lifelike sighed, ran his hand through his dark hair. “I’m sorry. I know how it must feel to be looked at the way I look at you. But you’ve had seventeen years to learn to deal with all the emotions inside your head. I’ve had two. Imagine having all your capacity for love and hate and joy and rage and only a couple of years to learn to handle all of it. Sometimes it feels like a flood inside my mind, and it’s all I can do not to drown.”

Eve remembered Dresden’s warning to Silas and her father about that same thing.

Had that been what led Raphael to kill himself?

Is that what drove Ezekiel’s feelings for her? Taking a childish infatuation and turning it into the focus of his life? He’d been her first love, and she couldn’t deny what he’d meant to her, how seeing him again now was making her feel, but…

Does he even know what love is?

“I know what I sound like when I say this,” Ezekiel confessed. “But I can’t help it. You were my everything. You still are. And you always will be.”

The boy who wasn’t anything close to a boy brought her hand to his lips, kissed her bruised knuckles. Despite the storm in her head, his words were cool water, washing away the hurt in her heart. His words were fire, lighting a flame in her chest. He leaned close, kissed the tears from her eyes, first her real one, then the implant where her eye used to be. His lips were soft. His touch electric. As real as anything she’d ever known.

She opened her eyes and found him staring at her in the gloom.

She didn’t know what she wanted.

She knew exactly what she wanted.

She shouldn’t go there, and she knew it. It’d be a mistake to fall back now. It was all too real. Too raw. She needed to get her head straight. To sleep. To think. And even though she could feel part of herself being dragged back toward him, Eve resisted. She wouldn’t be doing it for the right reasons. She’d be doing it to drown the hurt. To fall into his arms and forget herself. And truth was, she’d done enough forgetting to last a lifetime.

But, god, it was hard to push herself away….

“I should let you rest,” he said. “It’s been a long day.”

She was exhausted. Aching. Bones like lead. But the thought of sleep, of the dreams that might find her when she closed her eyes…

“Will you stay with me?” she asked. “I mean…just until I fall asleep?”

He smiled. Eyes shining.

“I can do that.”

Eve kicked off her boots, curled up under one of the blankets. She heard Ezekiel walk to the balcony, opened her eyes a crack and saw him standing there, silhouetted in the flickering light. A statue standing vigil. A watchman on the wall.

When the ash rose up to choke me, it was thoughts of you that helped me breathe.

When the night seemed never-ending, it was dreams of you that helped me sleep.

“Goodnight, Ezekiel.”

“Goodnight, Eve.”

She closed her eyes. Drifting into the dark. And when the dreams came, they weren’t of lifelikes marching into the cellblock in their perfect, pretty row. They weren’t of metal fingers curling closed or gunsmoke or blood or all she’d lost.

She dreamed of him.

Only him.

1.21 Fix

Solder and sparks. Acetylene and rust. Sweat and curses.

Eve was bent over Kaiser’s chassis in the ministry’s workshop, rewiring his ambulation systems. The workshop was sealed behind a bulkhead and heavy door. Her tools were third rate, the parts even worse. But if she could be grateful to Doctor Silas Carpenter for one thing, it was the chips in her Memdrive. All his know-how about biorobotics and mechanics and computers, hardwired right into her brainmeats.

Talking true, she’d never felt as at peace as she did when surrounded by machines. Up to her elbows in some old salvage or machina, unbreaking the broken and smiling as it began to sing. The Ana in her remembered her father in GnosisLabs, the way his brilliant mind had worked. In her mind’s eye, she could see her little brother, Alex, bent over his tool bench. The same joy on his face that she felt now. Eve was reminded of happier times in Dregs, working on Miss Combobulation in the Dome’s work pits. She knew where that love had come from now. It hadn’t just been the chips Silas had put in her Memdrive. It had been something deeper than that. Deep as the blood in her veins.

But then she remembered Hope’s words. Her WarDome bouts. The baying crowd. Oil and coolant, spraying like blood. The spectacle and slang, all used to disguise the horror of what it really was.

“OOC” instead of “murdered.”

“First batter” instead of “executioner.”

“WarDome” instead of “Killing Jar.”

Had it just been about the scratch? Or had it been something more?

Had she been Ana, even back then? Avenging herself the only way she could?

She’d been hard at work since before dawn, pausing only long enough to have a lukewarm shower and scrub herself with some industrial soap powder. Ezekiel hadn’t been there when she’d woken, but scrounging around the junk and detritus of Hope’s workshop, she’d found a little something to surprise him with later. A thank-you she hoped he’d understand. It was bundled up in a strip of tarpaulin on the workbench beside Kaiser.

Lemon and Cricket swung by the workshop with a bowl of Neo-Meat™ (“Sweaty undies flavor!”) for breakfast. Her bestest perched herself on the bench and watched Eve work, chattering about the kids in Hope’s care. Most were runaways, the unwanted and the unneeded. A settlement this grim, cracks this big, there were bound to be people who fell right into them and just disappeared.

“Hope takes them all in,” Lemon said. “Anyone under eighteen. Gives them a place to sleep. Schools them. Tries to fix them up with work after they leave.”

“Yeah,” Eve muttered. “She’s a regular saint.”

Lemon sucked her lip, wisely changed the subject. “How you doin’, puppy?”

Kaiser wagged his tail, gave a small wuff. Lemon peered over Eve’s shoulder, squinting at the long red cylinder in the blitzhund’s open chest cavity. It was marked with a small skull and crossbones, stamped with the word EXPLOSIVE.

“Is that his thermex?” Lem asked. “Salvage told me he disabled the detonators.”

“Yeah,” Eve nodded. “I’m thinking about taking it out altogether. I can jury-rig it into a grenade without too much trouble.”

Cricket looked up from a scrap pile he was searching. “That’s a bad idea, Evie.”

“Why? Can’t say I was ever too keen on the idea of my dog blowing himself up.”

“He’s not a dog,” Cricket warned. “He’s a blitzhund. And his job is to protect you. It’s like Grandpa said. We get hurt so you don’t have to.”

“He was never my grandpa, Crick.”

“Whatever you want to call him.” Cricket’s metal eyebrows descended into a frown. “You’ve got a cybernetically augmented bounty hunter on your tail. Someone with a ton of creds wants you dead or alive. Kaiser exists to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

“I don’t want any of you getting hurt for my sake. It’s not right.”

“We just want to protect you, Evie.”

“And I want to protect you, too. What’s wrong with that?”

“It’s wrong because we’re not human. We exist to serve you.”

Eve shook her head. Struck for the first time how wrong it was. The way humanity treated bots. The way she treated Cricket. He’d helped her build Miss Combobulation. Helped her ghost those eight logika in the Dome. Had she ever stopped to ask what he thought about it? Or had she just told him what to do?

He had feelings. They might be code and electrics, but that didn’t make them less real. Hope’s words were like a splinter in her mind. She couldn’t get around the wrong of it all. She couldn’t pretend Crick and Kaiser were her friends when she treated them like…

“I don’t want servants, Crick,” Eve said. “I know sometimes I don’t act like it. But you and Kaiser have always been more than that. You’re my friends. And I’m not going to let you put yourself in danger for my sake.”

“We do it because we love you.”

“You do it because you’re programmed to.” Eve set aside her tools, looked the little bot in the eye. “That’s not love, Cricket. And I don’t want it to be that way anymore. It’s not fair. It’s like Raphael said: You deserve a choice. Metal or meat. Blood or current. Everyone deserves a choice.”

The little logika tilted his head. A tremor of anger hissing in his voice.

“You think the only reason I stick with you is programming, huh? And part of you wonders, if I was given the option, I’d turn on you, maybe? Like they did?” He shook his head. “You’ve been hanging around these murderbots too long, Evie.”

“Crick, that’s not what I meant….”

The little logika hopped off the bench. And bristling with indignity, head wobbling, he marched out the door. Eve sighed, rubbing at her itching optic. Headachy and just plain tired. The world was moving too fast. Upside down and all the way backward.

“He’ll be okay, Riotgrrl,” Lemon murmured. “Easy on the take it.”

Eve looked at the cylinder of thermex in Kaiser’s chest. At the door Cricket had just left by. It was true, what she’d said. Every word of it. Maybe being around Ezekiel had opened her eyes to it. Maybe it was memories of Raph. Or Hope. Ana’s voice inside her head. Probably all of it. But whatever the reason, she’d had enough.

Picking up her screwdriver, she unfastened the explosives, removed them from the blitzhund’s chassis. She rigged the detonator with a makeshift pin and trigger, Kaiser taking note, watching carefully all the while. They’d still have some boom if that bounty hunter tracked them down again. It just wouldn’t be bolted inside her dog, was all.

She leaned down, planted a kiss on Kaiser’s pitted metal brow. The blitzhund licked her hand with his heat-sink tongue.

Free to choose.

She bolted Kaiser’s chassis closed, engaged his ambulation systems. The blitzhund sat on the bench, snuffling the air and looking uncertain. Eve backed off, clapped her hands against her knees. “Come here, boy. Come on.”

Kaiser looked to his back legs, gingerly testing them. As he realized he could move again, his tail began wagging furiously, beating against his hull with a series of dull clangclangclangs. He bounded down off the bench, running in circles and barking.

“Clever boy!” Lemon jumped to the floor, clapped her hands. “Come here, Kais!”

The blitzhund did a few laps of the workshop, metal claws skittering on the deck, wuffing for joy. Eve patted him on the head, opened the workshop door and let him loose into the ministry proper. Kaiser went bolting through the room, bounding over the cots and beds, the younger children watching, wide-eyed. He pranced among them, rolling over onto his back to let the more adventurous scratch his metal tummy, back legs kicking.

Lemon gave Eve a squeeze. “Good work, Riotgrrl.”

Eve stuffed the thermex grenade into a satchel, along with her surprise for Ezekiel. The girls walked out into the main room, Eve forgetting her hurts and smiling wide as she watched Kaiser rolling with the sprogs. Trying to savor her tiny victory. See the beauty in a moment, even if it was something as simple as watching her dog play with children.

“I’ve been thinking about what you said,” Lemon declared. “About whether your past makes you what you are. That’s all our memories are, right? The pieces of our yesterdays that make us who we are today?”

Eve thought about it for a while, finally nodded. “Sounds right.”

“So you’ve had some bad days, no doubt,” Lemon said. “But I figure, instead of letting your yesterdays bring you down, maybe you can concentrate on building some happier memories today. And that way you’ll have them for tomorrow?”

Eve chewed on that for a spell. Wondering if she was missing something. Maybe it was true what Lemon was saying. Her memories told her story, but only she could decide who she was going to be because of them. Did all the hurt and shadow in her past really matter? Or could she decide to not let it define her? She didn’t have to deny it. Maybe she just had to accept it. Maybe it was time to acknowledge who she’d been yesterday, and decide who she wanted to be tomorrow.

Eve looked at her friend sidelong and smiled.

“You’re one of the good ones, Lemon Fresh.”

“Well, don’t tell anyone. I got a rep as a gorgeous good-for-nothin’ to maintain.”

Eve put her arm around her bestest’s shoulder, and the girls sauntered on into the ministry’s heart. The kids playing with Kaiser were a motley mix of different ages. Daniella, Hope’s assistant, was teaching a small clutch of young ’uns with a makeshift chalkboard. Eve spied Ezekiel sitting at a battered table in a corner, playing cards with a group of sprogs. His tiny stack of bottle caps told Eve that for all his merits, the lifelike wasn’t much of a gambler. But he was smiling and joking, laughing aloud when a skinny gutter girl caught him trying to filch a few of her bottle caps on the sly.

“That’s cheeeeeating!” she cried.

“You got me,” he grinned.

Eve wandered over with a smile, hands in pockets.

“You should quit while you’re behind. They’ll have your shirt soon.”

“I just got it, too.” The lifelike pushed the skinny girl his remaining bottle caps. “Don’t spend them all at once.”

He’d changed out of his high-tech flight suit, found some battered old jeans and a black T-shirt that was a little too tight. The sleeve where his right arm should have been was filled out better than she’d expected. Rummaging in her satchel, she pulled out her gift, dropped it in his lap.

“Present for you.”

“What is it?”

“Open it up, Braintrauma.”

Ezekiel complied, peeling away the tarpaulin. Wrapped inside was a cybernetic arm.

It probably dated back to before the war. The cerebral relays were the old crappy kind that needed to be jacked into the nervous system directly at the spine. It was ugly, bulky, all pistons and bolts and smeared in grease. But it worked well enough—Eve had fixed most of the glitches between bouts of working on Kaiser.

“Figure it’ll tide you over till your old one grows back,” she shrugged.

The boy who wasn’t a boy looked her in the eye. Dimple creasing his cheek as he smiled his crooked smile, letting loose a storm of mechanical butterflies in her belly.

“Thanks.”

“Get your shirt off.”

Ezekiel’s eyebrow rose. He looked around at the assembled children, back to Eve.

“Ummmm…”

“Keep your pants on, Braintrauma. I need your shirt off to install the arm.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Lemon said. She scanned the room, found a beat-up old recliner chair with the stuffing leaking out of it, dragged it near to Ezekiel, dropped into it, reclined backward and pulled her goggles down over her eyes. “Okay. I’m ready.”

Two dozen expectant pairs of eyes were now fixed on the lifelike.

“…Mmmaybe we can do this someplace private?” he suggested.

Eve grinned. Motioned to the workshop. “Step into my office.”

The pair walked across the tanker’s innards to the workshop and closed the door behind them. Lemon sighed in disappointment, pulled the goggles off her head. She scoped the assembled urchins, the moldy playing cards on their makeshift table.

“You wanna play?” a skinny boy asked.

“Hells no?”

“You scared?”

Lemon yawned. “I don’t get out of bed for bottle caps, Stinky.”

The children glanced at Daniella to see if she was looking. Having confirmed the coast was clear, each pulled a handful of credstiks from inside their clothes, flashed them at Lemon.

“So. You wanna play?” the skinny boy asked again.

Lemon looked the kid in the eye. Fingered the stolen creds in her cargos.

“All right, you little snots,” she muttered. “Let’s dance.”

“What’s your name?” Stinky asked as Lemon pulled up a chair.

The girl cracked her knuckles. Picking up the cards, she fanned them out over the table, swept them up into a riffle shuffle, dovetailed them into a perfect stack and set them down before the wide-eyed children. She dropped her stiks on the table and smiled.

“You can call me Daddy.”

1.22 Immolation

“Is this going to hurt?” Ezekiel asked.

“As much as getting your arm ripped off in the first place? Probably not.”

Ezekiel sat on the workbench, side-eyeing the bulky cybernetic limb.

“I mean, we don’t have to do this. Mine will regenerate eventually.”

“Don’t be a baby. Off with the shirt, Braintrauma.”

“…You’re really back to calling me that now?”

“Off.”

The lifelike sighed, reached down with his one arm and wrangled his tee over his head. There was no trace of the Preacher’s bullet wounds anywhere—his skin was flawless. Eve tried not to notice the way the muscles flexed along his arm, rippled across his back. Tried not to notice the cut of his chest or the perfect hills and valleys running down his abdomen, the taut V-shaped line leading into his jeans.

Tried, and failed completely.

“Okay,” she said. “Hold still.”

She held the prosthetic to the stump of his arm. He’d regenerated most of his bicep along with the bone beneath, and she was forced to modify the limb so it’d fit, working in silence with welding goggles to her eyes. When she was done, she anchored the cyberarm to his bone with an interlocking cuff, wincing in sympathy as he hissed in pain.

“Sorry, that hurt?”

“It doesn’t tickle.” He grimaced. “Have you done this sort of thing before?”

“Not once.”

“Beautiful.”

“Why, thank you, kind sir.”

Eve secured the prosthetic with a leather shoulder guard and series of straps that stretched across the coin slot bolted between his pecs. Her fingers brushed his skin, and she couldn’t help but notice the way it prickled. She tightened each buckle, their faces inches apart. His eyes fixed on hers as the Ana in her breathed harder, the Eve trying her best to ignore him.

“You’re staring,” she finally said.

“Should I stop?”

Eve stomped the butterflies down into her boots, grabbed the handful of cerebral relays—long surgical-steel needles that plugged straight into his spinal column—that would connect the arm to his neural network. Under normal circumstances, this whole procedure would be done with anesthetic in sterile conditions, but she figured lifelikes weren’t human, so they probably weren’t susceptible to normal infections. Thing is, she didn’t even know if the prosthetic would recognize an artificial’s nervous system.

“Okay,” she warned. “This is really going to hurt.”

“Be gentle with m—”

Ezekiel winced as she pushed the needles into his skin, jacking the prosthetic into his spine. He didn’t bleed much; the wounds regenerated almost as fast as she made them. She saw the muscle tensing beneath his skin, veins taut along the line of his jaw. Connecting the power supply, she waited for the old prosthetic to boot up, establish its connection. Finally, she was rewarded with tiny green lights on its dusty LED screen.

“Okay.” Eve dusted her hands, backed away. “Try that.”

Ezekiel frowned, looking down at the arm. The corroded fingers slowly cinched closed, formed a bulky fist. He flexed his bicep, and with a hiss of hydraulics, the arm bent at the elbow. Twisted at the wrist. He smiled crooked, dimple creasing his cheek.

“Not bad for your first time.”

“It’s an old industrial model,” Eve said. “It can push a lot of psi. Try to break something.”

Ezekiel hopped off the bench, picked up a steel bracket from the pile of scrap parts. With a whine of servos and pistons, he crushed the metal in his fist.

“Very fancy,” he nodded.

“Okay, fine-motor test next. Try to do something gently.”

“…Like what?”

“I don’t know.” Eve glanced around the workshop. “Use your imagination.”

Ezekiel stepped up to Eve. Close enough that she could smell fresh sweat. Steel. Grease. And reaching down with deliberate slowness, he took her hand in his new one. Ran the thumb across her knuckles.

“How’s that?” he asked.

She looked up into his eyes. Pulse running quicker. Mouth suddenly dry. And sorting through the storm in her head, the feelings his touch flooded her with, she realized that, unlike last night, she didn’t want to fall into his arms and forget herself.

She wanted to fall into his arms and remember.

Was this the Ana in her talking? Or the Eve?

They’re the exact same person, she realized.

They’re you.

“I think you need more practice,” she heard herself say.

She held her breath as he lifted his real hand, touched her face. Running his fingertips ever so gently down her cheek. Her eyelashes were fluttering, her every nerve on fire.

“That’s cheating,” she whispered.

“Maybe I should quit while I’m behind?”

“No,” she breathed, lips just inches from his. “Don’t stop.”

“…Are you sure?”

She slipped her arm around his neck, dragging his mouth to hers. Kissing him long and slow and soft. Her eyes closed, she sighed, hands moving as if they didn’t belong to her. Roaming the smooth troughs and valleys of his shoulders and chest, feeling that old, familiar wanting, the needing, the breathlessness and weightlessness of it all. Flame building inside her, fingers clawing his skin as he lifted her up onto the bench. She held tight, wrapped her legs around his waist, pulling him closer. He was all she knew in that moment. Just the warmth of him. The taste of him. The feel of him beneath her hands. So real. So perfectly, wonderfully real.

His lips left a burning trail along her cheek, down her throat as she struggled to breathe. She dragged her tank top off over her head, crushed herself against him. With a sweep of his new arm, he cleared the workbench, her hands tangled in his hair, pulling him down. She felt like she was on fire, and she knew only one way to put it out. Drowning in those pools of old-sky blue.

Lemon had been right. It was time to stop letting the past define her. Time to accept the person she’d been and decide who she’d become.

“Eve,” he murmured, breath hot against her skin. “Eve.”

“No,” she breathed.

Her breath in his lungs. Hands and bodies entwined as she closed her eyes and finally, finally let go. Acknowledging who she’d been yesterday, and deciding who she wanted to be tomorrow.

“Call me Ana….”

Afterward, they lay on the floor, staring at the flickering tungsten globe above. His arm around her shoulder and her head resting on his bare chest. And though he wasn’t a real boy, she could still feel his heart beating. Taste his sweat. Every part of him was real, and every part of him was hers.

“I missed you, Ana,” he said.

“I think I missed you, too.” She frowned, shaking her head. “I think part of me always felt like something was missing. Even when I didn’t remember you.”

“But you remember now?”

“It still gets fuzzy on that last day. Those final hours.” She rubbed her eye and sighed. “Part of me wishes I could remember. The rest of me never wants to.”

“Do you remember when I came to you in your room? Our night together?”

“I remember.” She smiled.

“You’re different now.”

Ana raised her head, a suspicious frown on her brow.

Polluted.

Deviate.

Abnorm.

“Different how?”

“You bite more.” He grinned. “And you’re far prettier.”

She scoffed and gave him a playful slap. “My beautiful liar.”

Ezekiel pushed her off his chest and rolled her onto her back, staring down at her.

“I mean it,” he said. “The years might have changed you, but only for the better.”

She looked at her empty hand. Curling her fingers slowly closed.

“Even if I’m a freak now?”

Ezekiel frowned. “What are you talking about?”

She sighed. “I’m an abnorm, Zeke. Don’t you get what that means? Did you forget the Brotherhood? You think that bounty hunter is chasing me because he doesn’t like my fashion sense? You stay with me, you’re never going to be safe.”

A perfect frown marred that perfect brow.

“You remember what I told you that night in your room?” he asked.

“…That my imperfections make me perfect.”

“We lifelikes, you cut us, you hurt us, we go back to the way we were before. But you humans…the world hurts you, and you scar.” He touched the metal coin slot riveted into his chest. “That’s why I kept this. To remind me. Your scars tell who you are. Your skin is the page, and your scars are the ink, telling the story of your life. And your scars make you beautiful, Ana. ‘Deviation’ or whatever you want to call it? That’s just another expression of it. You call it freakish. I call it incredible. I can’t do it. And so I can’t help but love it. Or you.”

She opened her mouth to speak, but he silenced her with a kiss she felt all the way to her fingertips. And when she opened her eyes, he was looking at her the way she wanted to be looked at forever.

“Of all the mistakes I made, I think you were my favorite,” she whispered.

He smoothed back her hair, clouds forming in his eyes. She could see the worry in him. Remembering his patterns. The tilt of his head and the tightness in his jaw.

“We can’t stay here,” he finally said. “You know that, right? I’m not sure why that preacher is after you, but there aren’t many who could afford a hunter that dangerous.”

“I know.” She sighed, feeling the spell of the moment shatter. The floor was cold on her bare skin. The smell of rust hanging in the air. “And he’s going to repair his blitzhund eventually. Those kids out there…we can’t be here when he tracks us down.”

“I’ll take you anywhere. Far as you like.”

Ana’s brow creased in thought. She wondered where it would be safe to run. If she should run at all. Silas had tried to hide her from her past, and look how far it had gotten him. And even though the old man had built Eve a life of lies, a part of her still knew he’d done it with the best of intentions. Now, for whatever reason, he was in Faith’s clutches.

Even after everything he’d done, was she really going to leave him to rot?

“When Faith attacked us, she said she was taking me and Silas to see Gabriel. He’s still holed up in Babel with the others, right?”

Ezekiel shrugged. “I presume so.”

“Why would they want Silas and me back there?”

“…I don’t know. If you want to understand what’s going on in Gabriel’s head, you should talk to someone who saw him more recently than two years ago.”

“And who…”

Ana’s voice trailed off as she realized who Ezekiel meant. Her mouth soured at the thought. But Zeke was right—if she wanted to know the truth of why the lifelikes wanted her back in Babel, if she wanted to know the score between Gabriel and Silas and her, she should talk to someone who stood with him the day her world came crashing down.

The day her family died.

“All right,” she nodded. “Let’s go see Hope.”

She was teaching.

A gaggle of twenty children was seated around Hope as she gave a lesson on the last great war. The missiles that set fire to the sky, that turned Kalifornya into a shattered island called Dregs and scorched the deserts of Zona and NeoMex into glass. Ana hung back, Ezekiel at her side, watching the lifelike speak. Again, she was reminded of the morning they first met. The afternoon they last saw each other two years ago. Blood and smoke in the air.

“None above,” Hope said. “And none below.”

Hope seemed different now. Like Ezekiel. She moved differently. Less carefree, maybe. The Hope that Ana had known moved as if she were dancing. This Hope walked as if the entire world rested on her shoulders. Haunted eyes. A tremor in her voice that never quite faded. But as much as she saw the change, Ana couldn’t forget what Hope had done. Couldn’t bring herself to trust the lifelike. The thought of having to ask her for help left a sickness in Ana’s gut, her jaw aching.

The lifelike looked up, saw Ana watching her with folded arms. She called to the old woman, Daniella, asking her to take over the lesson. Walking over to Ana, she was barely able to maintain eye contact. Hands clasped together like a penitent.

“Do you need something?” the lifelike asked.

“To talk,” Ana replied, her voice like iron. “About Babel. About Gabriel.”

Hope sighed. Slowly nodded.

“Follow me.”

Lemon looked at Ana from a table in the corner. She was surrounded by scruffy kids, none of them older than twelve, playing what looked like five-card draw. She raised her eyebrow in question; Ana simply shook her head, motioned her bestest to stay put. She didn’t know where Cricket was. Sulking, probably. She needed to find him. Make it right…

Hope led Ana and Ezekiel up a tight spiral staircase, through a tangle of tunnels and out onto the tanker’s foredeck. The sun was blazing in the sky, near blinding after the hours they’d spent in the gloom. Ana engaged the flare compensation in her optic, closed her good eye and squinted out at the city of Armada.

The skyline was alien: upturned ships and wind turbines, that massive ocean liner buried nose-first in shattered concrete. The skies were full of rotor drones and wheeling gulls, the hum of traffic and stink of methane. To the south, she could see a vast factoryfarm, tiny metal figures laboring among GMO crops. Automata, making food they’d never eat. Feeding people who never thanked them.

One day, those hands will close, Ana. And they will become fists.

Hope leaned against the railing, looking out over the crush of humanity below. A rusty wind whipped her long flame-red hair around her face. Ana was struck by how beautiful and sad she looked. Bee-stung lips and haunted eyes.

“What do you want to know?” the lifelike asked.

Ana swallowed hard, tried to beat her misgivings about Hope down into her boots.

“You remember Silas Carpenter?” she finally asked.

“One doesn’t forget the man who helped birth her.” Hope glanced at Ana, then back to the bizarre skyline. “Zeke told me what he did. Rewriting your past. Pretending to be your grandfather. I wonder how long he thought it could last?”

“Faith snatched him. Tried to grab me, too. Take me with her.”

“Back to Babel.” Hope nodded.

“But why?”

The lifelike steepled her fingers, pressed them to her lips. Ana was acutely aware of Ezekiel standing beside her. The warmth of him. The soft whine of the servos and pistons in his new arm. Hope looked to the northern horizon, toward the Glass. Toward Babel.

“Your father created us to love, Ana,” she said. “But we love almost too much. In the days we were first created, it was even worse. The world was so new to us. Every feeling was so loud. Every sensation so tangible.” She glanced at Ezekiel, smiled sadly. “No one can love like we do. And when two of us love each other…”

Ana knew what Hope meant. Ezekiel had spoken about how hard it was for lifelikes to process emotions without a lifetime’s experience. She still found it hard to imagine the intensity of it. The ferocity. She looked at Ezekiel, remembering how wonderful it had felt to fall back into his arms. But what must it have been like for him to catch her? And how must it have felt to love that desperately, only to have it torn away from you?

Hope shook her head and sighed.

“Gabriel adored Grace. Losing her in the shuttle explosion nearly destroyed him. Looking back now, I think perhaps it drove him mad. And all he’s done since the revolt has ultimately been about her. Your father gave us many gifts, Ana. But one gift, he always kept for himself.”

“And that was?” Ana asked.

“The gift of life, of course. It wouldn’t do for the Almighty to teach his children to create as he had. What use, then, for a God?”

“Lifelikes can’t make more lifelikes…?”

“No. And that is all Gabe desires. To see his beloved Grace remade. Everything else is meaningless to him. It became a source of…friction between us.” Hope looked at Ezekiel. “Things were difficult after you left, brother. The family we once were disintegrated. Faith and Mercy stood with Gabriel. I couldn’t stomach what we’d done, left all of it behind. But Uriel and the others considered Gabe’s love for Grace a frailty. All too human. He and our remaining siblings have become…something worse than the rest of us put together.”

“So that’s why Faith snatched Silas?” Ana pressed. “To bring him back to Babel in the hope he’d teach them how to create more lifelikes?”

“Possibly,” Hope replied. “But Silas’s field of expertise was neuroscience. Alone, I sincerely doubt he has the knowledge to create another one of us. Your father was the true genius of Gnosis Laboratories, Ana. Ironically, in destroying him, Gabriel destroyed his best chance of seeing Grace reborn.”

“So why would Faith want me?”

“Nicholas Monrova is dead. But all his knowledge is locked inside the Myriad supercomputer. When your father suspected a conspiracy within the company, he reprogrammed Myriad to only take orders from himself or members of his family. And thus, a member of his family can unlock the AI. Command it to reveal the secrets of creating more lifelikes. If Gabriel truly wishes Grace reborn…”

“…He needs me,” Ana said.

“Yes. He needs you.”

Ana scoped the city of Armada. This scab of rust and ruin, humanity clinging to it by its fingertips. What would the world become if Gabriel learned how to create more lifelikes? What would a race of beings who believed themselves superior to humanity in every way do to humanity when they could build an army of themselves?

She looked south to the factoryfarm. Those tiny metal figures, slaving away.

And will we deserve it?

She’d be a fool to risk it. If the secret to unlocking Myriad was inside her head, marching back to Babel to rescue Silas was the height of idiocy.

But she remembered. Remembered him nursing her back to health in the months after the revolt. Remembered being holed up in Dregs, Silas spending every cred he made to keep her healthy and fed. Remembered him writing the software that helped her walk again. Modifying the optic that let her see again. He’d saved her life during the revolt. Got her out. Kept her hidden. Kept her safe. And though the memories were monochrome and jumbled and fuzzy at the edges, she remembered enough. She remembered she loved him.

She heard the echo of his words in her father’s office, years and lifetimes ago.

“I’m your friend, Nic. Your family is my family. Never forget that.”

He’d deceived her.

But truth was, he’d loved her, too.

Why else would he have protected her? Kept her hidden all these years?

“We have to go get him,” she realized.

Ezekiel raised an eyebrow. “You mean Silas?”

She shook her head. Looked north, across the wastes.

Toward Babel.

Toward home.

“I mean my grandpa.”

“Entering Babel will be no easy task,” Hope warned. “Lifelikes aside, the radiation levels are still too high for anyone to plunder the city. But Daedalus Technologies has no wish for anyone to steal Gnosis secrets, either. They have a garrison posted there. No infantry because of the radiation. All machina. Juggernauts. Titans. Siege-class.”

“Well, I’ve scrapped w—”

Ana heard a thin yapping bark rising over the city’s song. She turned from the horizon, peered over the railing to the foredeck. Amid the milling crowd, the stalls and shacks, she saw a fluffy white dog. It was no bigger than her boot, cute as buttons. But it was looking right at her. Snuffling the air and barking.

A figure in a new black coat was standing beside it. Staring at her with eyes of shocking blue. And with a red right hand, he slowly tipped the brim of a dusty cowboy hat.

“Oh, shit…,” Ana whispered.

1.23 Bleed

“Cricket!”

Ana kicked open the hatchway, barreled back into the ministry.

“Lemon!”

The redhead looked up from her hand of cards, surrounded by grubby opponents.

“Wassup?”

Ana dashed to the workshop to grab her satchel. Tools. Excalibur. Thermex grenade. “Get your gear, we gotta go!”

“What, right now?” Lem demanded. “I’m sitting on four kings over here.”

“I fold,” said the greasy sprog opposite her.

“Fold,” said the skinny girl beside her.

“Fold,” said every other player at the table.

“Goddammit,” Lemon growled.

Two thunderous booms echoed in the room, the ministry’s double doors shuddering as their hinges were blasted away. The doors toppled inward with a crash. Silhouetted against the sunlight was a tall figure in a long black coat and cowboy hat.

“Oh,” Lemon said. “I see.”

Kaiser stood up from his nap at Lemon’s feet. His eyes flooded red, and a long, low growl spilled from his vox unit. Ana sprinted out the workshop door, satchel in one hand, Cricket slung on her shoulders and shouting, “Whatwhatwhat?”

“Kaiser! Lemon! Come on!” Ana roared.

Lemon was on her feet, bolting for the stairwell. The girls and the blitzhund scuttled up the steps to the upper deck, squeezing past Hope and Ezekiel. The two lifelikes stepped into the ministry, children running in all directions, screaming at the sight of this stranger and his guns. His little dog stepped inside, muzzle peeled back in a tiny, razored snarl.

The Preacher scoped the room. He hauled out a pistol and fired half a dozen times into the ceiling, roaring over the gaggle of panicking children.

“All right, quitcher hollerin’!”

The room fell still. The Preacher’s eyes were on Ezekiel. Glancing at the lifelike beside him, taking her measure.

“I am hereby notifying all residents of this domicile that I’m here on official Daedalus Technologies business. Any y’all who find the concept of becoming innocent bystanders unsettling”—he waved to the smoking hole behind him—“go on and git.”

“Go on, children,” Hope said. “Get out of here. Daniella, keep them safe.”

The old woman nodded to Hope, wordlessly shepherded the sprogs toward the exit. Some wailed for the lifelike, calling her name as they were dragged away.

“Nooooo, I don’wanna leave!”

“I wanna stay with Hope!”

“It’s all right, my lovelies,” the lifelike smiled. “I’ll see you tomorrow. You go with Dani now. Be good. Remember your prayers.”

The Preacher stood motionless as the orphans and urchins were herded out, sniffling, crying, big ’uns carrying the smaller kids, Daniella pushing and prodding. The Preacher tipped his hat at the old woman when she hobbled past.

Hope spoke softly as the children scattered, her eyes never leaving the bounty hunter.

“Ezekiel,” she said. “You should go.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” he replied.

“Your place is with Ana.”

“There’s two of us,” Ezekiel replied. “We can take him.”

“Ana doesn’t know, does she? About what you did?”

Ezekiel flinched, jaw tightening. “No.”

Hope looked at him then. Eyes soft. Voice hard.

“You lost her once, little brother. Most of us never get a chance to redeem ourselves with those we wrong.” She nodded back up the stairs. “You can steal a vehicle in the Wheelhouse. One that will get you to Babel. Go. Quickly. Don’t fail her again.”

The room was empty now. Hope’s orphans had all vanished; people had scattered from the decks outside at the first sound of gunfire. Rust blew in through the open doorway on an acrid wind, the Preacher’s coat billowing about him like smoke. He sucked hard on his cheek, spat a long, sticky stream of brown onto the ministry floor. Looked Hope up and down.

“You’d be another special little snowflake, then.”

“Go, brother.” Her eyes were still locked on the Preacher. “Find redemption.”

“Hope, I—”

“GO!” she roared.

Ezekiel threw one last murderous glance at the bounty hunter. Looked up the stairwell to where Ana and the others had already disappeared. He touched Hope’s cheek, gentle as falling leaves. She closed her eyes briefly and smiled. And then Ezekiel was gone, bounding up the stairs four at a time in pursuit of the girls.

The Preacher sniffed, tilted his head until his neck popped.

“Mighty noble of you. But ain’t nowhere they can run I can’t find ’em.”

“I can’t help but notice you don’t seem in a particular hurry to pursue.”

“Naw.” The Preacher smiled. “You do this job long as I have, you git as good at it as I am…well, it gets a mite dull, darlin’. Gotta look for ways to make it a challenge.” The bounty hunter spat at Hope’s feet. “Talkin’ true, I’m startin’ to enjoy myself.”

“Enjoy yourself?” Hope frowned. “This is a house of God. I am his child, and I—”

“His child?” The Preacher shook his head, patting the Goodbook in his breast pocket. “Darlin’, I’ve read this cover to cover more times’n I can count. And in all them times, I don’t recall once seein’ mention of the likes of you.”

“He made man in his image.” Hope stepped into the center of the ministry floor, arms spread. “And we are made in the image of man.”

“Mmmf.” The bounty hunter nodded. “You bleed red, I’ll give you that. And I’d like to know exactly what your boy is capable of before I tussle with him again.”

The Preacher raised his pistols and smiled.

“So. May I have this dance?”

Hope moved. Like a lightning strike. Like a hummingbird’s wings. Sweeping up a metal cot as if it were paper, slinging it with the force of a wrecking ball. The Preacher dove sideways, firing as he went. Gunfire thundered, shell casings falling like rain as the bounty hunter emptied his clips. Hope took a shot to her leg, another to her belly, flinging another cot and sending the Preacher flying backward into a wall.

Both combatants hit the deck, rolled to their feet. The Preacher spat tobacco and blood, unslinging the automatic rifle from his back as Hope spun behind a support column. She flung another cot, which smashed into the wall beside the Preacher’s head and dented the case-hardened steel. The Preacher laid down a hail of fire, Hope’s cover riddled with smoking pockmarks as the hollow-points flew. The little fluffball dog was still poised at the entrance, bristling with impatience. It yapped once, shrill over the gunfire.

“You just hold back, Mary,” the Preacher growled. “Keep an eye out.”

Hope snatched a fire extinguisher while the Preacher reloaded. As he raised his rifle, Hope hurled the extinguisher at his head like a javelin. The bounty hunter ducked, firing, the bullets striking the blood-red casing and popping the pressurized can like a balloon.

White powder filled the air, falling like the long-forgotten snow. The Preacher blinked in the haze, dragged his sleeve across his eyes. Hope careened out of the fog, landing a crushing blow to the side of the bounty hunter’s head. The man flew like a ragdoll, rifle spinning from his grip as he hit the floor. Hope was on his chest in an instant, pinning his arms with her knees, pummeling his face with astonishing ferocity, her own face utterly serene.

WHUMP.

“Forgive me, Father,” she prayed.

THUD.

“For I must sin…”

CRUNCH.

Grasping the Preacher’s head, she pressed her thumbs to his eyes. The man gasped, bending at the waist and swinging his legs up. His spurs punched clean through Hope’s throat as he locked his ankles around the lifelike’s neck. And roaring furiously, he kicked down, slamming Hope’s head into the floor with a bone-shattering thud.

They rolled away from each other, Hope clutching her skull, the Preacher pawing at his eyes. The two were both bloodied, the Preacher’s chin covered in a slick of tobacco red. Hope’s hair had torn loose from her braid, arrayed about her face in a ragged halo as she rose to her feet, beautiful and terrible as a naked flame.

The Preacher scrambled upright, closed in to hand-to-hand range. Hope swung like an anvil, the bounty hunter blocking with his cybernetic arm. The pair collided in a savage dance of brute strength and shocking speed. Each a blurred reflection of the other. Both more than human.

The Preacher cracked seven of Hope’s ribs with a single punch. The lifelike pirouetted, deflecting the bounty hunter’s strike and locking up his arm. She slammed her open palm into his belly, bending him double. Smashing her fist down on the back of his head, finally bringing up her knee and sending him sailing ten feet back into the wall.

The bounty hunter crashed to the floor, blood spraying from split lips. He clawed the deck, trying to regain his feet.

“Well, darlin’.” The Preacher coughed red. “I confess, I am impressed….”

Hope said nothing, stepping toward the bounty hunter with hands outstretched.

“Mary,” the man muttered. “Execute.”

A split second. The briefest sliver of time. Hope turned, flaming hair glinting in the sunlight. And sitting on the deck right behind her, wagging its tail, was the fluffy white dog. A soft hum spilling from its chest. Its eyes glowing blood red.

“Wuff,” it said.

The explosion tore through the ministry, immolating everything it touched. Searing heat. Deafening noise. Black smoke billowed through the hollow space in the aftermath, the concussion echoing long after the blast had died.

The Preacher dragged himself to his feet. Spat his mouthful of tobacco onto the deck, scarlet and sticky brown. He pulled his hat back on, bloody spurs chinking as he limped through the burning mattresses. The metal floor was scorched where his blitzhund had detonated. Smoking scraps of fur were all that remained. The Preacher stalked to the figure crumpled against the wall. Her hair crisped and smoking. A bleeding, blackened ruin.

“Mmmf,” he said.

Hope grimaced, trying to struggle upward. Her body was riddled with shrapnel. Her legs had been blown off by the blast. And still, she tried to stand.

The Preacher placed a boot on her chest. Leaned hard.

“You shrug off bullets easy enough.” He glanced at the charred wreckage of her thighs. “But fire? Well, that seems to stitch you up just dandy. Some might call that ironic, darlin’, given the flames waitin’ for you when this life is over. Which is now, by the way.”

He drew a long knife from his boot.

“Now. Let’s see just how much bleedin’ you can do afore you’re done.”

Lemon sprinted along the Gibson’s deck, hand locked with Eve’s. Cricket was riding on Eve’s back, stuffed inside a satchel with a bunch of tools and spare parts. Kaiser ran out in front, barking urgently, knocking peeps out of the way. Lem heard the sounds of distant gunfire, the crowd thinning out as people ducked inside their shanties and tents. A faint whistle. Calls for the Freebooters.

“Where we goin’?” Lemon gasped.

“Just keep running!” Eve replied.

They bolted across a wobbling footbridge to a huge oil tanker, Lemon again making the mistake of looking down. The street below was an open-air market, everything from salvaged toys to rad-free water to strips of unidentified meat being haggled over in the dusty throng. Eve dragged Lemon through the crush, following the sound of Kaiser’s barking. The press, the heat, above all, the noise were almost overwhelming. And beneath it all, Lemon fancied she heard someone shouting.

“Ana!”

Cricket poked his bobblehead up from Eve’s satchel. “You hear that?”

Lem turned to look behind them, simply too short to see over the mob. She pulled free from Evie’s grip, crawled up a rusting ladder for a better view. Peering back the way they’d run, she spotted Ezekiel, forcing his way through the gaggle of automata and logika and humanity’s dregs. No sign of that bounty hunter in pursuit.

“Dimples!” she yelled, waving. “You okay?”

Ezekiel finally made it to the oil tanker as Lem hopped down onto the deck. Not even pausing to explain, the lifelike grabbed her hand with his prosthetic, Evie’s hand with his other, and just kept running. Dragging them onto a junction between the tanker’s forecastle and a tangled nest of shipping containers, consulting the lopsided signpost.

THE BRASS IIIIXII

SAMSARA VIIXIII

RED SHORE IVIII

THE BILGE IIIII

“Where’s Preacher?” Evie asked.

“With Hope. We need to go. Now.”

“…You just left her there with him?”

“Hope can handle herself. She told me to leave.” The lifelike’s eyes were wild as he scanned the signs, glancing over his shoulder every few moments into the milling crowd.

“Zeke, I—”

“Ana, I’m not losing you again! Now help me figure this maze out.”

“Where we goin’, Dimples?” Lemon asked.

“Wheelhouse. Hope said we can get transport there.”

“Can’t we just grab a pedal cab?” Eve asked.

“Um…” Lemon shoved her hands into her pockets. “We got no scratch.”

“You had a handful of credstiks just last night!” Cricket cried.

“I was lulling them into a false sense of security! I had four kings, I told you!”

“You mean you lost our entire bank gambling with kids?”

“ ‘Our’ bank? I don’t remember you cutting any pockets, you little fug.”

“I swear, the next time someone calls me little, I’m going to blow my—”

“All right, all right,” Ezekiel said. “Let’s just figure out how to get there on foot.”

Lemon squinted at the directions, tilting her head in case they made more sense that way.

WHEELHOUSE VIXI

“Erm…”

“They’re Roman numerals,” Evie said, pointing. “Look. Head five ships southeast, east nine ships, down one level. That’s the Wheelhouse.”

“Who the hells knows Roman numerals anymore, Riotgrrl? I mean, what use is that knowledge, in terms of your average postapocalyptic hellscape?”

“Quite a lot, apparently,” Cricket said.

Evie winked. “Mad for the old myths, me.”

“Let’s go,” Ezekiel said.

The quartet dashed off into the crowd, Kaiser hot on their heels.

Two ships over, Preacher stepped out onto the deck of the Gibson. Cleaning a long knife on a bloody rag.

“Quite a lot, apparently,” he mused.

The bounty hunter stared out over Armada, absentmindedly polishing his blade.

“Drop the shank!” a voice bellowed. “Drop it, and get down on the goddamn floor!”

Preacher sighed. Looked sidelong at the squad of Freebooter bullyboys gathering all around him. Seemed the neighbors hadn’t appreciated the ruckus.

“Mmmf,” he grunted.

The Freebooters were clad in piecemeal armor, made of hubcaps and Kevlar, strips of tire rubber and plates of scrap metal. But the guns they carried were the business—greasy automatics with enough punch to slow him up for a bit. Two of them even had flamethrowers. There were a dozen. More on the way, if his aural implants were anything to go by (and, yes, they were). Preacher didn’t really feel like a tussle, despite the blasphemy.

“Y’all obviously got no clue who I am,” he said.

“I know you’re gonna be a lot shorter, you don’t hit the deck now!”

Preacher frowned, scoped the Freebooter leader. He was wearing old football armor riveted with plate steel. His skull-and-crossbones bandanna was pulled up over his face, but the bounty hunter could tell he was barely old enough to shave.

Kids these days…

“Tell you what, son,” Preacher said. “I’m gonna reach into my coat. Nice and slow, like. And I’m gonna pull out the warrant I got for the missy I’m chasin’, who, I might point out, is beating feet farther from my current whereabouts as we jaw here.”

Preacher licked his split lips, spat bloody.

“You’re gonna notice a Daedalus Technologies seal on this warrant. You’re gonna figure out I’m in this pig’s sphincter of a town on Corp business. The Corp. The one that supplies the juice to Armada’s grid. You’re gonna conclude the missy I’m chasin’ is wanted by that same Corp and that you’re wasting said Corp’s valuable time. And you’re gonna mumble a big ol’ apology, you’re gonna order your boy to hand over that flamethrower there and, last, you’re gonna step the hell out of my way. We understand each other?”

The kid drummed his fingers on his rifle. Utterly unmanned.

“…You move slow,” he finally said. “Real slow.”

Preacher reached into his black coat.

Held up his Daedalus warrant with a red right hand.

“Now,” he said. “Hand me my goddamn flamethrower.”

1.24 Glass

His ma had named him Quincey, but everyone called him the Velocipator.

He was a wizard. He didn’t wear robes or have a beard or a broomstick, but he conjured magic, true cert. In a world where nothing really worked anymore, the powerful needed a mechanic just as much as they needed armies and guns. And so while the Velocipator wasn’t one of the brightest peeps in Armada, he was still one of the most important. He kept the grid pumping juice. He kept the subway in working order. But most important, he kept the Admiral’s wheels spinning.

At the moment, he was working on her pride and joy: the Thundersaurus. The car was a beast—an old Mustang coupé cropped onto a monster truck chassis, its rear suspension jacked ten feet off the ground. The Admiral had a thing for ships, so the Velocipator had customed the ’Stang’s snout into a point, like the prow of an old speedboat. It was layered with rust, intake rising out of the hood like a tiny mountain of chrome. But it moved like its name, shaking the earth as it came.

The Velocipator pulled his screwdriver from between his teeth, hollered over the deep dub spilling through the old tune spinner.

“Oi, Slimm, you wanna grab me those filters Pando brung us? Might see if they fit.”

The Velocipator heard a series of wet thuds. A soft spang.

He swore he could smell burning hair.

“…Slimm?”

Armada’s chief mechanic crawled out from under Thundersaurus, cursing beneath his breath. “Bloody slackers, if youse are on the smoke again, I’ll…”

The man’s voice trailed off as he focused on the belt buckle in front of him. It was steel, slightly tarnished, attached to a pair of filthy cargo pants, which were in turn wrapped around a skinny girl with an impressive blond fauxhawk. She had a top-line optical implant and a Memdrive on one side of her skull. Welding goggles on her brow. A baseball bat rigged with some kind of shock generator in both hands.

“Hi,” she said.

The mechanic blinked. “You lost, sweetheart?”

“You don’t have any radiation suits around here, do you?”

“…Yeah, what for?”

“We’re going on a picnic.” She smiled.

The Velocipator frowned. There was no way this slice should be in here—the Wheelhouse was guarded by at least half a dozen Freebooters at any one time, sometimes more, and none of them had sent him word. And looking around, he saw no sign of Slimm, Jobs, Rolly or Snuffs, so there was no way she was here at their invite.

“Fizzy wheels.” She nodded to the beast behind him.

“Yeah, Thundersaurus, she’s a beaut.”

“Could I borrow the keys?”

“…What for?”

“Well, it’s gonna be easier to steal with the keys.”

The Velocipator’s frown was deepening. He saw a prettyboy with an old MfH-VI prosthetic arm cruise out from behind the fuel drums, rubbing his knuckles. He was carrying an automatic rifle that looked an awful lot like Rolly’s. The sawed-off shotgun stuffed into his jeans definitely belonged to Slimm—Velocipator could see his initials on the grip.

Prettyboy was followed by a tiny freckled girl with a jagged, cherry-red bob and what might’ve been an old 12-series-Cerberus blitzhund that had been stripped back to the combat chassis. The dog growled right at him, low and electric.

The Velocipator looked the blonde up and down. Realizing at last that she meant business—that she actually intended to steal the Thundersaurus.

“Sweetheart, do you know who this car belongs to?”

“Yeah.”

She held out her hand expectantly.

“Me.”

Turns out Zeke could drive.

As they roared out of the Wheelhouse, Ana was genuinely worried about getting out of the city alive. They’d stomped the Freebooters in the garage without too much drama—talking true, she doubted many folks in Armada would be stupid enough to try to poach the bosslady’s wheels, and the guards hadn’t really been expecting any capital T. But by the time they’d loaded Thundersaurus with spare tanks of juice and whatever supplies they could scrounge, the alarm had gone up.

As they tore out through the Wheelhouse door, at least half a dozen Freebooters opened fire from perches atop nearby ships. It was only Ezekiel’s skill at the wheel that stopped their jaunt to Babel from turning into the shortest road trip in history.

Bullets spannnged off the panels, shattered a side mirror, tap-tap-tapping against the extended rimguards as the bruisers tried to shoot out the tires. The Thundersaurus roared down a loading ramp, screeched around a sharp corner. They crashed snout-first through a series of spare-parts stalls, Lemon shouting “Sorreeeeeee!” out the window at the scattering merchants as they roared away. Bullets fell like rain, but finally, with a thunderous crash, they hit the bottom of another ramp and made it to ground level.

Thundersaurus’s engine howled in protest as they burst out through a heavy iron gate and hit the cracked concrete of the old city. Street folks scattered, hurling abuse, dust whipped up in the truck’s wake as the bullets petered out and died. Ezekiel stomped the accelerator, the truck roaring as Ana was pushed back into her seat. Kaiser stuck his head out the open window, heat-sink tongue lolling as they tore through the ruins of the Armada undercity, past the rusted hulks and subway signs and finally out onto the open road.

“Slow down!” Cricket shrieked.

“Go faster!” Lemon howled.

Grit and dirt blew in through the open window, and Ana dragged down her goggles. The engine was thunder and earthquakes, shaking her whole body, the city and their pursuers left in Thundersaurus’s dust. She looked through the rear window, saw Armada’s bizarre skyline disappearing in the haze of the setting sun. No sign of pursuit. Nothing but empty in the mirror. She whooped, hammering on the roof with her open palm and grinning.

Ezekiel turned onto a shattered freeway headed north, out toward the wastelands of the Glass. The road was pitted and potholed, but Thundersaurus’s tires were almost as big as Ana, handling all but the widest fissures with barely a bump. She turned around to check the backseat, still grinning.

“Everybody in one piece?”

“Barely.” Cricket scowled. “Slow down, you lunatic—we’re clear!”

Lemon gave her the thumbs-up as Ezekiel eased off the throttle a little. Kaiser still had his head out the window, his tail thump-thump-thumping against the seat. As the kilometers were chewed up under their wheels, Ana settled in to take stock of their gear.

They’d scrounged two assault rifles and a double-barreled sawed-off from the Freebooters they’d stomped, along with the grenade she’d rigged out of Kaiser’s thermex. Ana claimed the shotgun, strapped it to her leg. She wasn’t a great shot, and her lingering fear of guns wouldn’t help her shoot better in a crisis, so any weapon forgiving of a bad aim was a bonus. She didn’t know how well any of this gear would work against the Preacher anyway. But still, it was better than walking around with nothing but a grin on her face.

They’d snaffled an extra two barrels of juice for the engines, plus some almost clean water. Food might be a problem, but it was one that could wait. Best of all, they’d grabbed two rad-suits from the Wheelhouse supply lockers—turned out the Armada crews did regular salvage runs through the Glass and had the gear to protect themselves. The wasteland was still radioactive from the blasts that melted it in the first place, and anyone running it without proper protection was buying a one-way ticket to Cancer Town.

Ana popped out through the sunroof, hair whipping around her goggles. She squinted at the fuel barrels in the open trunk, saw a bullet hole through the one on the left.

“One of our tanks got hit during the escape,” she reported, ducking back inside and slamming the sunroof closed. “We’ve lost about a quarter of our juice.”

“This is a terrible plan,” Cricket said. “We should have our heads read.”

“Your protests are duly noted, Mister Cricket.”

“Evie, I—”

“I told you, Crick. My name is Ana.”

“Ana, then.” Cricket waved his hands as if beating away flies, still obviously upset about their argument in the workshop. “This is crazy. If what Hope told you is true, Babel has been guarded by a Daedalus Technologies garrison for almost two years. So even if we make it all the way there without this bucket breaking down—”

“Bucket?” Ana stroked the car’s seat. “Hush, you’ll hurt my baby’s feelings.”

“How are we gonna get past an army of siege-class badbots piloted by the best Daedalus has to offer?” Cricket demanded. “We already performed unauthorized surgery on a BioMaas kraken. Do we really want to be getting on the bad side of Daedalus, too?”

“The warrant on Ana’s head was put out by Daedalus,” Ezekiel said. “The Preacher said so when he hit the ministry. So she’s already on their bad side.”

“We knew it was someone with deep pockets after you, Riotgrrl,” Lemon muttered. “But not that deep. What the hells you do to get Daedalus Technologies on your back?”

“Think about it,” Ezekiel said. “Ana dropped a Goliath just by yelling at it. She can fry blitzhunds with a word. All Daedalus Technology gear runs on electrical current. Their machina. Their vehicles. And BioMaas and Daedalus have been circling each other ever since Gnosis collapsed. Sooner or later, one of them is going to try for the throne. Now, what do you think a BioMaas army could do with a weapon capable of frying any Daedalus tech with a wave of her hand?”

Ana looked down at her open palm.

“They could win a war,” she muttered.

“But she doesn’t even really know how to control it…,” Lemon objected.

“Apparently, Daedalus doesn’t care.” Ezekiel shrugged. “They want Ana caught or killed before BioMaas figures out a way to use her to their advantage.”

“Maybe that’s it, then,” Ana said.

“…That’s what?” Cricket asked.

“The way in.” Ana closed the fingers on her hand. Held up her fist. “If I can drop Daedalus tech just by thinking on it, we head for their machina garrison outside Babel and use me to punch straight through it.”

“Evie—”

“I told you, it’s Ana, Cricket.”

“Whatever name you slap on it, this is pants-on-head stupid.”

Ana ignored the bot’s fretting, settled into her seat. The hum of the engine was almost hypnotic, the world outside the window flying by too quick to scope. The tunes spilling out the sound sys were solid, the company, bankable. She looked at Ezekiel in the driver’s seat, his olive skin turned golden by the sinking sun. Those too-blue eyes fixed on the road ahead. Had it really been just a couple of days since she’d found him in the Scrap? It felt like she’d lived two lifetimes since then….

They roared on through the wasteland outside Armada, the built-up houses of a desiccated suburbia slowly giving way to wide and open roads, rocky badlands and endless deserts. The country was almost beautiful in its barrenness, just a few tiny specks of civilization humming amid all this nothing. The minutes melted to hours, the meters to miles. Nothing but the dub and her own thoughts for company. Every moment, they were drawing closer to Babel. Every moment was bringing her nearer to the things who’d killed her family, destroyed her entire world. Faith. Gabriel. Their siblings.

What would she say to them?

Where would she even begin?

Lemon was in the backseat, drumming her fingers on the cracked faux leather. Thumping her feet off-time to the music. Something was eating her, Ana could tell. It had been chewing her for days now, backing up behind her teeth like an old 20C traffic jam.

“You okay, Lem?” she asked.

“Fizzy. Max fizzy.”

“You seem kinda jumpy.”

Lemon chewed her lip hard. Foot tapping. All adrenaline and nerves.

“Look, I know Crick is programmed to fret, Riotgrrl,” she finally said, “but maybe he’s onto something.”

“A human talking sense?” Cricket growled. “Someone pinch me, I’m dreaming.”

Lemon clapped a hand over the little logika’s voxbox to muffle his voice. “You’ve taken out a Goliath and a couple of Spartans before, true cert,” she said to Ana. “But how you gonna fight off a whole garrison of them? They’ll blow us off the road before we get anywhere near Babel.”

“Ezekiel drives a mean stick. And I’m getting better at it, Lem. It didn’t take me half as long to fry that blitzhund as it did those Spartans. Maybe I’m figuring it out.”

“Maybe you were just lucky? Maybe it’s easier to fritz smaller things?”

“Maybe we won’t know until I try? I mean, unless you’ve got a better plan?”

“This is crazy, Riotgrrl. I’m glad you wanna get Mister C back, but—”

“Crap,” Ana said.

“Um.” Lemon blinked. “That’s a little rude, but okay….”

“No.” Ana pointed past Lemon’s head, out the rear window. “Crap.”

The day had been ground away beneath their wheels, and the sun was almost set into the west. The sky bled through from sullen gray to a furious red, the edge of the world consumed in flame. Ana could see the tiny Armada skyline to the south, silhouetted against the glow. But through the dust in their wake, she could see a smaller cloud: a tiny dark speck closing in on their tails. She engaged her telescopics, narrowing focus until she found a single figure, bent over the handlebars of a low-slung motorcycle. Black coat whipping behind him in the dirty wind. Blue eyes fixed directly on her.

Lemon scrounged up a pair of binocs from underneath the seat, peered through the filthy glass. Cricket climbed up beside her, both speaking simultaneously.

“Craaaap.”

“Preacher,” Ana breathed.

Ezekiel glanced into the rearview mirror, squinting against the sunset.

“Are you sure?”

“It’s him.” Ana nodded. “Definitely.”

Ezekiel’s face went pale, his hand gripping the steering wheel so hard his knuckles turned white. The metal groaned in his grip. His eyes were just a little too bright.

“Hope…,” he whispered.

Ana didn’t know quite how to feel. Hope had betrayed her father. Helped murder her family. Forgiveness was never going to be an option. But the lifelike had been trying to make some kind of amends in that ministry. Atone as best she could. She’d given them sanctuary. Helped them when the whole world seemed arrayed against them.

Did she deserve to die?

Murdered by some psychopath in a fight that wasn’t even hers?

Ana had no time to fret over the question. Squinting through the dust, she realized even worse news was riding hot on the Preacher’s tail. Not just one motorcycle, but dozens. Flanked by heavier trucks, tricked-out dirt racers, juiced-up 4x4s. Skull-and-crossbones flags fluttering from their aerials, daubed across their hoods. A posse of Freebooters from Armada by the look, hell bent on getting back their bosslady’s stolen wheels.

Didn’t think she’d take it that personally…

Ezekiel pointed through the windshield.

“Ana…”

She looked to where Zeke was motioning. The sunset to the west was spectacular, but the sight in front of them almost stole her breath away. Through her telescopics, Ana could see black clouds on the northern horizon, a looming wall of darkness that stretched from the earth far up into the heavens. Lightning streaked across the sky, crackling a strange, luminous orange. The rolling wall was still kilometers away, but looked to be right in their path. Her belly turned cold with dread.

“You frightened of a little thunder, Stumpy?” Cricket growled.

“That’s no rain cloud,” Ezekiel said.

“It’s a glasstorm,” Ana breathed.

Lemon blinked in confusion. “They make those in glass now?”

“I remember them from when I was little,” Ana explained. “They’d sometimes blow in all the way to Babel. The Glass is basically just a big section of desert melted by the bombs back in the war, yeah? So when the winds pick up hard enough, sometimes the glass gets whipped up along with all the sand and dust. Glasstorms can be hundreds of kilometers across. They can last days. Sometimes weeks.”

“Well, that sounds like a whole bunch of zero fun,” Lemon said.

“Depends if you consider being torn to pieces by shards of radioactive silicon fun.”

“Point of order,” Cricket said, rapping his knuckles on the seat. “I can’t help but notice we’re driving directly toward this whole bunch of zero fun about as fast as we can. Shouldn’t we be headed right the hell away from it?”

Ana glanced at Ezekiel. “My learned colleague raises a good point, Zeke.”

“It’s over a thousand kilometers between here and Babel, even cutting direct across the Glass,” he replied. “Nearly twice that if we go around the storm. If we lost a quarter of our fuel in that stray shot to the tanks, I’m not sure we have the juice to make a detour that big. This truck runs fast, but she’s thirsty.”

“Wait,” Cricket said. “So you want to take us into it? If you’re that keen on murdering us, there’s less obvious ways to get it done, Stumpy.”

“Take a look behind us,” Ezekiel said. “That’s a whole bunch of murder on our tails already. We head into the Glass, any of those Freebooters who didn’t bring rad-suits will have to turn back or risk dying of radiation poisoning.”

“We stole rad-gear from the Wheelhouse,” Cricket pointed out. “They’ll know where we’re headed. They’d have come equipped, for sure.”

“Even if they did, half of them are riding bikes. They follow us into the glasstorm, they’ll risk being ripped to ribbons. Halving the number of angry people with guns chasing us would be a good way to stay unmurdered, wouldn’t you say?”

Ana scoped the wall of blackness through the dirty windshield. It looked like a rolling cloud of smoke, kilometers high. She remembered the bad ones that had hit Babel when she was a little girl. Curled up in bed with Marie and Alex, Myriad’s reassurances rising over the howling song of millions of razor-sharp shards scraping against her bedroom window. One time it was so bad, she and all her siblings had ended up in their parents’ bed, cowering under the silken sheets. And Babel had only ever caught the edge of the storms. She had no idea what it would mean to actually drive into one.

But if they didn’t have the fuel to drive around it…

“Doesn’t sound like we have much choice,” she declared. “Number One, your thoughts?”

Lem pulled down her goggs, gave a thumbs-up. “Unmurdered sounds grand to me.”

“Looks like the ayes have it again, Mister Cricket,” Ana shrugged.

The little logika growled and shook his head. “You know, democracy sounds like a great idea until you spend three minutes with the average voter.”

Ezekiel gunned Thundersaurus toward the tempest. Ana and Lemon broke out the radiation gear they’d stolen from the Wheelhouse—two lumpy plastic suits with sealed, gas-mask-style helmets. One was a disgusting shade of green, the other a violent pink.

“Dibs!” Lemon cried, grabbing the latter.

“You leave me the one that’s the color of snot?” Ana groaned. “Nice.”

Lem held the pink plastic up to her head. “Goes with my hair, see?”

The gear was made for peeps twice their size, so Ana and Lem both kept their boots on as they dragged the suits over their regular clothes. The plastic was heavy, padded, sweaty. But the suits were grade-one, judging by the labels, which meant they were safe to wear even in the hottest zones of the Glass. Blitzhund brains and spinal cords were rad-shielded as a matter of course, so Kaiser would be safe from any poisoning. And Cricket wasn’t organic.

Which left…

“Are you going to be okay in there?” Ana asked Ezekiel, zipping up the plastic.

“I’ll be fine.” The lifelike nodded. “Lifelike cells don’t mutate, so I can’t get cancer. Radiation doesn’t hurt us. It’s why Gabriel had Faith overload the Babel reactor.”

Ana closed her eyes. Trying to think back to that day. The revolt. The neutron blast. Even with the chip containing her false memories removed, she still couldn’t quite remember those final hours. It was like trying to hold on to handfuls of sand—the harder she squeezed, the more the memories slipped through her fingers. Again, she remembered Myriad’s voice, ringing like music over the sound of wailing alarms, the panic of the fleeing populace. She remembered waiting in that cell with her family. The terror and uncertainty.

Gabriel.

Uriel.

Hope.

Faith.

Red on my hands. Smoke in my lungs. My mother, my father, my sisters and brother, all dead on the floor beside me. Hollow eyes and empty chests.

Ana opened her eyes. Head throbbing. Optic whirring.

Why can’t I remember…

The wastes whipped past outside the window, the glasstorm looming ever larger. Lemon zipped up her rad-suit, pulled the bulky helmet over her head and asked in a booming, hollow voice, “Do I make this look fabulous, or do I make this look fabulous?”

Ana couldn’t help but smile. The ache eased off, just a breath. No matter how bleak it got, how dark the places in her head grew, she’d always have Lemon. She was a rock. Always ready to dole out the sass. It meant more to Ana than her bestest would ever know.

Cricket, as ever, appeared less than impressed with her antics.

“I can’t help but feel you’re not taking this seriously, Miss Fresh,” he growled.

Lemon dragged off the helmet, inspected her reflection in the visor and brushed down her bangs. “I’ll have you know I take my fabulosity very seriously, Mister Cricket.”

The little bot sighed, climbed back up the rear seat, peered through the dirty glass. Kaiser was beside him, spitting a low growl.

“Preacherboy is gaining on us,” Cricket warned. “And the rest of that posse might reach us before we hit the storm, too.”

“Can this baby go any faster?” Ana asked.

Ezekiel stomped the accelerator into the floor, Lemon whooping as Thundersaurus surged. The road grew rougher as they tore closer to the Glass, potholes growing deeper, cracks wider. It was as if the wasteland were slowly creeping closer to the coast, intent on devouring humanity’s last remnants. Ana saw ruins of old settlements: people who’d tried to make a life away from the fiefdoms of Armada or Megopolis or the BioMaas CityHive. The rusted shells of ancient vehicles or the skeletal remains of homesteads, half buried in the sands. She wondered if anything would be left of humanity in a hundred years. She wondered what would happen if Gabriel got his way and populated the world with lifelikes.

Would humanity’s children make a better world than their creators had?

Or would they destroy it forever?

The kilometers wore on, the road disintegrating until it was nothing but shattered clumps of asphalt, choked with sand and spindly tufts of mutated weed. Ana checked behind them, saw the Preacher drawing ever closer. The Armada posse was following, too—the Freebooter bikers gaining slowly and surely, the bigger vehicles keeping pace. In terms of strategic planning, maybe stealing the flashiest ride in the city hadn’t been her finest hour….

Still, it was a fizzy set of wheels.

The glasstorm filled the horizon before them, rising up from tortured earth. They were only a few klicks from the edge now. She heard a low, menacing howl building under the music. She could make out razor-sharp shards, glittering red in the sunset light. Lightning the color of flame, tearing the sky with blinding arcs.

She looked at Ezekiel.

“You sure about this?”

He glanced at her. Flashed her a smile about three microns short of perfect. The way she wanted to be smiled at forever. And reaching down, he took her hand.

“Trust me,” he said.

She squeezed his fingers and smiled back.

“I do,” she said.

1.25 Tempest

Chaos.

Bedlam.

All-out war.

The winds hit them about a kilometer from the storm’s edge, buffeting the Thundersaurus like a kid’s toy. The truck shuddered and veered sideways, Ezekiel fighting to keep them steady. They plunged on, darkness filling the road before them, the sound of glass rain and pebbles pattering against the truck’s snout. Ana squeezed Ezekiel’s hand a final time, then released it so he could keep both on the wheel. She pulled on her rad-suit helmet, checked her seals. Windows closed. Air vents shut.

“Everyone ready for this?” she yelled over the rising roar.

“Nnnnnot really.” Lemon winced.

“Definitely not!” Cricket shouted.

“Wuff,” said Kaiser.

“Too late now! Hold on!”

The storm front crashed into them like a hammer, almost tearing the wheel from Ezekiel’s grasp. The lifelike cursed, dragged the truck back under control as they were consumed by a seething cloud of dust, dirt and millions of gleaming splinters of glass. Ezekiel was forced to ease off the accelerator, turning on the headlights and driving almost by feel through the chaos. The noise was deafening, an endless, starving roar thundering over the sandpaper scrape on the Thundersaurus’s skin.

“Holy crap!” Lemon wailed.

“Put your seat belt on!” Cricket shouted.

“You’re not the boss of me!” Lemon hollered, pulling her seat belt on tight.

Another burst of wind slammed the truck sideways, tires squealing. Ana saw the constant barrage of tiny glass particles stripping the rust right off the Thundersaurus’s hull, blasting it back to the gleaming metal beneath. They had no clue how wide the glasstorm was, no idea when it might end; now that they were in it, they were in it up to their necks. All she could do was hold on and hope.

Hours passed, the cacophony melting into a deafening drone. The thunder of the road, the storm, the glass on the hull and beneath the wheels all blurring to soup inside her head. Ana looked into the backseat, saw Lemon huddled with Cricket. Kaiser was pressed low to the ragged cushions, head in Lemon’s lap. The girl’s eyes were wide with fear.

“If you ever had doubts about my affection for you, Riotgrrl…,” she began.

“Never,” Ana replied. She reached back, took hold of Lemon’s hand. Almost overcome for a moment. All the miles, all this way, Lemon had never wavered. Never flinched. Never questioned. Not once.

“You hear me, Lemon Fresh?” Ana squeezed her fingers. “Never.”

“You still owe me that pony, you know.”

Ana smiled. “I’m good for it.”

“Listen…”

Lemon glanced at Ezekiel. At Cricket in her lap. Her customary impish smile was gone. No mischievous gleam in her eyes. She seemed afraid suddenly, struggling with the words she so obviously wanted to speak.

“Listen, Riotgrrl, I’ve gotta tell you something—”

The rear window blasted inward with a roar, the cabin filling with a storm of grit and dirt. Lemon screamed as a hand wrapped in a red glove reached through the shattered glass. The truck slewed over the road, Ezekiel blinded by the dust and glass. Kaiser growled, seizing the arm in his jaw, metal grinding on metal. Ana could see the Preacher clinging to the trunk, a heavy gas mask over his face. He wasn’t wearing rad-gear—just that same black coat stuffed with guns. She didn’t know if he had a death wish or if he was just aug’ed enough to deal with radiation poisoning. But the fug was here, and he meant biz.

Thundersaurus hit a pothole, wrenching sideways and slamming Ana into the door. She fumbled, dragging her sawed-off out as Ezekiel struggled to get the truck under control. The cabin was filled with grit and glass, the lifelike blinking black tears from his eyes. Lemon grabbed Excalibur, swung it awkwardly in the enclosed space. It cracked across the Preacher’s face, let loose a blast of current, the bounty hunter cursing in pain. The Preacher dragged himself waist-deep into the cabin, grabbing Lemon’s collar and slamming her head into the door once, twice, three times, until her eyes rolled up in her skull.

“Lem!” Ana screamed, bringing up the sawed-off. The bounty hunter slapped the gun aside, one shot gutting the seat beside him with a deafening BOOM. Kaiser was still tearing at his arm, eyes glowing bloody red. Cricket was fumbling in their satchel, trying to haul out an assault rifle that was as big as he was. The truck hit another pothole, bouncing everyone hard. And Ana took aim and off-loaded her second barrel right into the Preacher’s chest.

BOOOOM.

The bounty hunter was blasted back out through the window in a cloud of smoke, blood and glass. His fingers grasped at the trunk as he rolled backward, but with a black curse, he toppled off the lip and out of sight, dust spraying when he hit the road.

“Eat that, you dustneck trash-humper!” Ana shouted.

Thundersaurus hit another pothole, almost flipping, Ezekiel desperately fighting to maintain control. Ana tore the rad-suit helmet off her head, ripped the goggles from her brow and slipped them over Ezekiel’s eyes. The storm howled, pounding on their truck like the hammer of some vengeful god, Cricket roaring over the bedlam.

“Slow down, Stumpy, are you trying to kill us?”

Gunfire erupted behind them, bullets riddling the truck’s skin. Ana pulled her headgear back on, squinted through the hail of glass. She saw motorcycles, dark figures in the chaos. Gas masks with skull-and-crossbones designs covering their faces.

“The Armada boys followed us into this? Are you kidding me?”

“You had to steal the fanciest car, didn’t you?” Cricket howled. “I warned you to take a smaller one, but nooooooo, sorry, Mister Cricket, the ayes have it again!”

“Will you shut up?” Ezekiel bellowed.

“Right after you pucker up and kiss my shiny metal man parts!”

“You got no man parts, Crick!” Ana yelled. “Shiny or otherwise!”

She unclipped her seat belt, crawled into the backseat as the bullets continued to fly. Lemon was out cold, blood dripping from the reopened split in her brow. Poor kid had been knocked out more times in the last few days than a bush-league pit fighter. Ana laid her bestest down in the footwells, hauled one of the assault rifles from her satchel. The weapon was heavy, the echoes of old gunfire filling her head. The smell of blood. Screams.

“Better to rule in hell,” the beautiful man smiles “than serve in heaven.”

No. That was then. This was now. She wasn’t her past, and her past didn’t define her future. Her friends needed her. She thumbed the safety, switched her optic to thermographic setting and took aim at the heat signatures of the pursuing Freebooters. She could make out a few trucks and buggies, a dozen bikes, swooping closer and blasting at Thundersaurus’s tires.

Ana aimed down the sights, letting off a strobing burst of fire. Lightning the color of flame sizzled overhead as one of the Freebooters wobbled and fell. Ana fired again and again, hitting nothing and using up the rest of the clip. The Freebooters returned fire, forcing her into cover to reload as bullets riddled the truck’s panels. The gunshots echoing inside her head, Lemon lying on the floor at her feet, the image, the noise, the chaos dragging her back to that cell, that day, those final hours…

Red on my hands. Smoke in my lungs. My mother, my father, my sisters and brother, all dead on the floor beside me. Hollow eyes and empty chests.

The lifelikes stand above me. The four of them in their perfect, pretty row.

They have only one thing left to—

An Armada wagon careened out of the glasstorm, sideswiping Thundersaurus. Ana was thrown back against Kaiser as Ezekiel slammed into the attacking truck.

“Ana, come take the wheel!” the lifelike shouted.

“I can’t drive in this!”

“I can shoot better than you, take the damn wheel!”

The driver-side window shattered as one of the Freebooters emptied half a clip into the truck’s flank. Ana hunkered down near Kaiser, feeling bullets spang off his armored shell. Ezekiel snatched up the other assault rifle, one hand holding the wheel steady as he riddled the wagon’s driver and gunner with lead. The wagon crashed into Thundersaurus again and careened away, taking out another motorcycle rider before flipping end over end and exploding in a ball of garish blue methane flame.

“Take the wheel!” Ezekiel roared.

“Okay, okay, no need to get shouty, god!”

Ana rolled over into the front seat as Zeke stood up through the sunroof. The razored fragments began shredding Ezekiel’s unprotected skin, whipping his knuckles and cheeks bloody as he started taking methodical shots at the pursuing Freebooters. Ana gripped the wheel hard, stomped on the gas, Thundersaurus lurching forward with a thundering V-8 roar as bikes and cars closed in from all sides.

The lifelike fired again, again, ghosting half a dozen bikers and three more drivers before his rifle ran dry. A Freebooter leapt from a speeding sand buggy onto Thundersaurus’s trunk, another jumping from an armored 4x4 alongside. They clung to the truck’s flank, one reaching through the shattered window and clutching Ana’s throat. She shrieked, tore the wheel left, colliding with the 4x4 beside them and crushing both men to pulp between the vehicles.

Cricket was in the backseat, reloading Ana’s shotgun and rifle. He handed the latter to Ezekiel, who kept blasting away at the pursuing vehicles. Ana was bent over the steering wheel, squinting through the fog of sweat inside her rad-suit headgear. The road had disappeared entirely, rocky outcroppings rising out of the desert floor ahead. The glasstorm howled on, like some horror from one of Ana’s old myths. Scylla or Charybdis. Fenris or Kali. A thing of hatred and hunger, consuming everything in its path.

The armored 4x4 was still roaring alongside them, its flanks now splashed with red. The driver rammed his ride into Ana’s, trying to drive her into a stone outcropping. Ana rammed the 4x4 back, Thundersaurus grinding against the bigger truck in a hail of sparks. Cricket cursed as he flopped about on the backseat like a ragdoll, Kaiser barking out the broken window. The 4x4 was heavier, and Ana had trouble keeping a straight course, headed now for a huge spur of black rock rising out of the sand in front of them.

“Ezekiel?” she shouted.

Gunfire was the only response, empty shell casings falling through the sunroof like hail.

“EZEKIEL!”

The lifelike finally heard her, turned on the truck beside them and riddled the cabin with bullets. The driver slumped over the wheel, and Ana wrenched her own steering wheel sideways, missing the spur by inches. His gun dry, Ezekiel dropped down into the passenger seat, slamming the sunroof closed.

“Out of ammo,” he wheezed. “But there’s only a few bikers and one truck left. Just plant it, fast as you’re able. I think we’ve knocked the fight out of them.”

“Do you want to take the— Oh my god!” Ana gasped.

Ezekiel was covered in blood. His knuckles had been stripped back to metallic bone by the glasstorm, his beautiful face dripping red. Ana’s goggles had spared his eyes the worst of it, but the exposed skin on the rest of him…

“Zeke, are you all right?”

“Don’t worry about me,” he said.

“You look like someone threw you in a blender!”

“I’ll be fine in a while. Trust me.”

Dread clawing her insides, Ana turned her attention back to the road, knuckles white on the steering wheel. Checking her flanks for their pursuers, listening for engines over the howling winds. She glanced in the rearview mirror.

“Crick, is Lemon okay?”

The little bot had fished some electrical tape from her satchel, secured the floor mats over the holes in the rear windows. Everything inside the cabin was covered with grit and glass. The little logika bent over Lemon, pulling off her headgear to inspect the wound.

“I think so,” he reported. “Maybe a concussion. But she’s breathing all right.”

Ana shook her head. That’d been too close. If anything had happened to Lem…

They drove on, the storm pummeling their little truck, all the world gone black. The headlights cut a swath through the darkness, glinting on the swirling shards, burning red as that strange lightning arced above their heads. The engine groaned and shuddered but held true. Dragging them on through the roiling night, closer and closer to Babel.

Closer and closer to home.

Ana glanced again at Ezekiel. The lifelike was wiping the blood and dirt from his face with his good hand. He’d just risked his own life, torn himself to shreds, to keep her in one piece. He hadn’t hesitated for a second. Her chest ached to see him hurt for her sake, filled with warmth to see him risk it in the first place. His vow in the ministry rang in her head. The truth of it now impossible to ignore.

There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to keep you safe.

She touched his arm, as lightly as feathers falling. “Thank you, Zeke.”

“For what?”

“For everything.”

He smiled lopsided, and gave her a small bow. “You want me to take the wheel?”

“Probably a good idea.”

She slid over his lap, he slid underneath, the pair momentarily tangled together as they traded places. Ana took a deep breath, checking again for signs of pursuit. All she could see outside was darkness. Glass and grit were still pouring in through the driver-side window, so Cricket crawled over Ezekiel’s shoulder and duct-taped another floor mat over the hole, intentionally sticking his hind parts in the lifelike’s face as he did so. Ezekiel was too busy steering to wave him away. The wind eased off, and Cricket gave his metal tush one more rub in Zeke’s grille before crawling into the backseat once more.

“Enjoy yourself?” the lifelike asked.

“Immensely,” Cricket replied.

Ezekiel glanced at Ana, shook his head. “We should be clear of the Glass in an hour or so. If the storm reaches as far as Babel, that’s all good. The leftover Freebooters will probably give up when they figure out where we’re headed.”

She nodded. Risked a smile despite the bedlam and blood all around them.

“That was some fancy shooting back there.”

He winked. “You’re not so bad yourself.”

“We make a pretty good team, huh?”

“We?”

She could see her smile reflected in the perfect blue of his eyes. She laid her head in his lap, felt the warmth of his skin through her rad-suit. Remembering.

“Yeah.” Ana sighed. “We.”

“I think I like the sound of that.”

He put his arm around her, squeezed her against him. And despite all the bedlam, all the blood, it felt right. It felt real. It felt like the way she wanted to feel forever.

Him and her. Together.

Forever.

1.26 Terminus

Red on my hands. Smoke in my lungs. My mother, my father, my sisters and brother, all dead on the floor beside me. Hollow eyes and empty chests.

The lifelikes stand above me. The four of them in their perfect, pretty row.

They have only one thing left to take from me.

The last and most precious thing.

The tempest followed them until dawn, smoky spears of light beginning to filter through the haze of dust and glass. Ana had eventually left Ezekiel to his driving, climbing over into the backseat and nursing Lemon in her lap. Her bestest was slowly coming to, murmuring softly. Her brow and eye socket were swollen and bruised, blood clotted in her lashes. Ana risked taking off the girl’s headgear again to wash the wound while Cricket and Kaiser looked on nervously.

“Lem?” Ana murmured. “Lem, can you hear me?”

“Nnnnn,” Lemon said.

“Are you all right, Freckles?” Ezekiel asked.

“No…,” Lemon groaned softly. “Come kiss it b-better.”

“She’s gonna be fine.” Ana smiled.

Lemon opened her eyes a crack, hissing in pain. “What the hells…hit m-me?”

“Cybernetically enhanced killing machine,” Ana replied.

“Is it…T-Tuesday already?”

“Just lie still. You might have a concussion.”

Kaiser looked out through the windshield and growled.

“Ana,” Ezekiel said. “You better come up here.”

“Crick, give her some water,” Ana said. “Not too much, or she’ll be sick.”

Ana leaned down, kissed Lemon on the brow.

“You stay low, Lem. Keep your head down and don’t do anything stupid.”

“Too…late,” Lemon moaned.

“Ana…,” Ezekiel warned.

Ana climbed into the passenger seat, squinted through the thinning glasstorm. Through the pale dawn haze, she could make out a skyline rising from the desert floor. Her blood ran cold, goose bumps prickling her skin. She was stricken suddenly with a barrage of memories. Sitting with her brother and sisters in pristine white rooms. A garden, full of flowers that existed nowhere else on earth. Music in the air and mechanical butterflies and a great library of books. Her father’s arm, strong about her shoulders. Her mother’s lips, warm upon her brow. A heaven in a world run to ruin.

“Babel,” she breathed.

It stretched up from the sand ahead, a spear of steel and glass trying in vain to pierce the sky. It was only in stories that irradiated objects actually glowed, but there was something in the air—the dust or glass that intertwined itself with the dawn’s light and the radiation lingering in the city’s bones—setting the metropolis aglow. It looked as if the whole city were burning with translucent flame.

Unlike Armada, atop its crumbling ruins, Babel seemed almost part of the landscape, flowing up from the ground in a vaguely organic coil. The tower was really two spires, twisting about each other like a double helix of DNA. In its day, it had been a thing of breathtaking beauty. But that was yesterday….

The city around it was an empty shell now, all broken windows and encroaching rust. Where once the air had been filled with thopters and rotor drones, now only a single irradiated crow circled in the skies. Where once Babel had teemed with life, it now stood hollow and silent, a corroding tomb for the people who’d been murdered there. The day the machines stopped singing. The day her family died.

Ana found her eye welling with tears. She hadn’t thought it would affect her so deeply, but seeing her former home was like seeing a ghost. All the fragments of her past life, all the blood and anguish and pain, immortalized in glass and chrome and isotopes that would take ten thousand years to degrade.

“Are you all right?” Ezekiel asked.

She simply shook her head. Mute and aching. This place wasn’t her home. It was a mausoleum. The place her childhood had ended, spitting her out into a life of rust and dust. But still, that was the life that had brought her Lemon. Kaiser and Cricket. And, yes, even her grandpa. She could feel those two people inside her head again. The girl she’d been and the girl she’d become. Looking at the tower, the place one girl had died and the other had been born, she didn’t know whether to feel sorrow or relief.

Ezekiel saw the look on her face, took hold of her hand. His skin was warm and alive and real, and she entwined her fingers with his. Breathing a little easier.

“I’m with you,” he said.

“I’m glad,” she smiled.

Ana squinted through the glasstorm and the grubby windshield, making out the dim shapes of the Daedalus encampment ahead. She could see huge machina—Titans and Tarantulas and Juggernauts—glinting in the dawn light. Heavily armored, legs like pillars, microsolar cells gleaming in their desert-camo paint jobs. They stood silent vigil or walked endless patrols through the dead suburbia outside Babel’s broken walls. She wondered what the pilots inside them had done to land such a crappy detail. How bored they must get out here, praying for something to shoot at.

And, silly her, she was about to grant their wish.

Just a few days ago, a single deranged Goliath had almost ghosted her solo. Who knew how many machina were waiting for her out there? All of them fully armed, max juiced, the pilots inside just itching to put a six-foot-under hurting on anything that strayed too close.

“We’re not in WarDome anymore, Toto,” Cricket muttered.

“Yeah,” Ana whispered.

“I hope you’ve got your mojo warmed up.”

“Me too.”

Ezekiel squeezed her hand and smiled. “I believe in you, Ana.”

“Great Maker, someone kill me…,” Cricket groaned.

The lifelike glared over his shoulder. “Not a lot of romance in your soul, is there?”

Cricket arced the cutting torch on his middle finger. “Romance this, Stumpy.”

They roared out of the glasstorm, into the swirling eddies and rolling clouds at the tempest’s edge. Thundersaurus had been stripped bare by the storm’s abrasive winds, the dawn gleaming on its buffed metal skin. Ana could see the Daedalus garrison more clearly now. It wasn’t so much an army as a police force, maybe a dozen heavy machina in total, here to ensure no looters plundered Babel’s irradiated secrets. But even if the pilots were half-asleep at the controls, a handful of those badbots were enough to deal with a motley scavver crew from Dregs with only a few popguns between them.

Unless one of them happened to be a living silver bullet, that is…

Ana closed her eyes, feeling for the closest machina. It was a Tarantula—a squat, eight-legged killing machine as big as a bus, bristling with pods of short-range missiles and twin autocannons. It swiveled its torso at the sound of oncoming engines, extended a radio aerial to transmit an alert to the rest of the Daedalus garrison.

“Attention, unidentified vehicle,” the pilot announced through his PA. “Attention, unidentified vehicle. This area is restricted by order of Daedalus Technologies. You have thirty seconds to divert course or I will open fire.”

Ezekiel gunned the accelerator. The Thundersaurus surged forward, leaving the glasstorm howling behind them. The Tarantula turned to face the oncoming truck, legs shifting in a ghastly imitation of a real spider, two pods of missiles unfurling at its back like vast, glittering wings.

“If you do not divert course, I am authorized to use lethal force,” the pilot warned. “You have fifteen seconds.”

“…Ana?” Ezekiel asked.

“I’ve got this,” she hissed.

She dragged back the sunroof, stood up for a better view. Sweating inside the snot-green plastic rad-gear, she felt the dust and sand pattering on her visor. Ana reached out, narrowed her eyes against the dawn light, locked them on the Tarantula. Picturing herself back in the WarDome. Remembering the taste of blood in her mouth. The pain. The terror. Dragging it all up from her belly, mixing it in with the anguish of seeing Babel again. The memories of her family. Alex. Olivia. Tania. Marie.

Mother.

Father…

All of it. Every shred. Every drop.

“Come on…,” she whispered.

“Ten seconds.”

“Ana?” Ezekiel shouted.

“I’m trying!”

The pilot braced his machina’s legs in firing position. Ana curled her fingers into claws. The Eve in her refusing to flinch. To turn away. They’d met death before, after all. Spat right in its face. Clawed and bit and kicked their way back from the quiet black to this.

This is not the end of me.

This is just one

more

enemy.

Static electricity dancing on her skin. Denial building up inside her, pulsing in her temples as the Tarantula’s missile batteries arced to life. Rage bubbling up and spilling over her lips as she raised her hand and screamed.

And screamed.

AND SCREAMED.

…

…and absolutely nothing happened.

“Firing.”

Missiles howled from their launch tubes, dozens of them streaking toward Thundersaurus, smoking vapor trails behind them. Ezekiel tore the wheel left, the truck tipping up onto two wheels for a torturous moment before crashing back to earth with a spray of dirt. The missiles roared in from the sky, exploding into boiling clouds of fire behind them. Deafening impacts shook the truck, Ana slipping back down into the cabin and hanging on for dear life. Another salvo of missiles hit alongside, blasting the floor mats loose from the broken windows. Ana felt the heat almost blistering her skin.

“What…t-the hells?” Lemon groaned, lifting her bleeding head.

“Lem, keep your head down!” Ana roared. “And get your seat belt on!”

She held out her hand, trying to summon it again. Her power. Her gift. Whatever the hells you wanted to call it. The affliction that had seen her hunted by the Brotherhood, chased across a wasteland of radioactive glass by a cybernetically augmented killing machine. The curse that had seen the biggest CorpState on the Zona Coast put a contract out on her head.

Trashbreed.

Deviate.

Abnorm.

Fat lot of good it was doing her now.

“Why won’t it work?” she hissed.

The Tarantula let loose another volley, and only Ezekiel’s skill behind the wheel kept them from all being incinerated. The earth around them blossomed into beautiful flowers of flame and black smoke, shrapnel peppering their hull. Ana could see two Titans charging across the wastes in their direction—huge bipedal machina that made Goliaths look like toy soldiers. A Juggernaut was rolling right at them, too, tank treads cutting the dirt, autoguns blazing. Kaiser began barking out the back window, tail thumping against the seats. Cricket poked his head up to quiet the blitzhund down, his mismatched eyes boggling as he spied what had riled Kaiser up.

“Um,” he said. “Point of order…”

A spray of high-velocity rounds shattered the front windshield, Ana shrieking as Ezekiel pushed her below the dashboard. The engine blew a plume of black smoke, making a sound like bolts being dropped into a meat grinder. They were still at least two kilometers from Babel’s suburban sprawl, but if they could get into the streets, there’d be more cover. Ezekiel gunned the engine, hitting an old broken highway; Ana crawled into his lap and stretched her hand toward the machina now moving to cut off their path to the city. She closed her fist. Gritted her teeth. Tears in her eyes.

“Dammit, why won’t it work?”

Lemon groaned, trying to pull herself up in her seat. Cricket waved her down, double-checking her seat belt as he spoke.

“Um, I don’t want to alarm anyone. But you might wanna look behind us….”

Ana peered through the busted rear window, heart sinking as she saw a familiar figure roaring out of the glasstorm. He was riding a different motorcycle, probably recovered from one of the Freebooters Ezekiel had shot. His chest was crusted with dry blood. Clothes shredded. Gas mask over his face. But still, there was no mistaking him.

“Preacher…,” Ana breathed.

“Are you kidding me?” Ezekiel glanced into the rearview mirror. “What does it take to kill this fu—”

The missile caught them on the driver’s side, striking the earth just below the door. Every remaining window in the truck exploded, glass spraying the cabin as Thundersaurus was flung into the air, spinning as it went. Lemon wailed, clutching her seat belt as the truck tried to fly. Ana wasn’t lucky enough to be belted in, Ezekiel folding his body over hers and roaring “HOLD ON!” as Thundersaurus crashed back to earth, flipping nose to tail in a hail of glass and flame. The world turned end over end, Ana cracked her skull against something hard, blinding pain seething through her Memdrive. No way up or down. Endless, agonizing moments as the truck kept rolling, crashing, splintering, finally skidding to a smoking halt.

Blood on her tongue. Glass in her hair. Pain lancing through her skull. Ana groaned, peering out through the shattered windshield. Kaiser had been thrown loose in the crash and was lying motionless on the cracked asphalt. She couldn’t see Cricket. The truck had landed on its roof, with Lemon suspended upside down by her seat belt, groaning and senseless. Any second now, another payload of missiles would come flying from those Tarantulas. She had to get out, had to stop them….

Ezekiel unbuckled his seat belt, collapsed almost on top of her.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

Blinding light in her head. Screaming in her ears.

The lifelikes stand above me. The four of them in their perfect, pretty row.

They have only one thing left to take from me.

The last and most precious thing.

Not my life, no.

Something dearer still.

“I…”

She heard boots on gravel, the soft chink of approaching spurs.

The Preacher’s voice, dry as shale.

“…coordinates seven-seven-twelve-alpha. Priority one. Priority one. Check your fire, Omega, repeat, check your fire.”

Ana heard heavy footsteps, the crunch of tank treads in the dirt. The hum of servos and the hiss of pistons. Her head was white-hot pain. Static ringing in her skull where she’d cracked it. She put her hand to her Memdrive, felt a deep split in the housing beneath its pseudo-skin. Her fingers came away soaked with blood.

The four figures part, and a fifth enters the room. Male. Broad shoulders, silhouetted against the glare. The others look to him, expectant.

“I can’t,” the newcomer says.

“You must,” they reply.

“I won’t.”

The leader offers his pistol. “You will.”

“Ezekiel…,” Ana said.

The newcomer wipes his hand across his eyes.

But finally, he takes the pistol.

“Oh god…”

She looked into the lifelike’s eyes. That old-sky blue. Those eyes that had looked at her with such adoration as they lay together in her room. So much pain as he raised the pistol and aimed it at her head…

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“It was you,” she whispered.

“What?” Ezekiel blinked. “What was me?”

Tears blurring the world around her. Memories finally coalescing. The last remnants of those final hours. The five of them, standing there in that cell above the carnage they’d made. Gabriel, Uriel, Hope, Faith.

And him.

They have only one thing left to take from me.

The last and most precious thing.

Not my life, no.

My love.

“You…” She choked on the word, unable to breathe.

“Ana…”

She scrambled backward through the broken window, out onto the dusty road. Blinding sunlight. Tears fracturing the world into a million shining pieces. The Preacher stood there, a pistol in one hand, what must have been a flamethrower in the other. Cricket crawled out from beneath the truck, dented and wobbling. The little logika shuffled to Ana’s side and put his arms around her.

“Are you okay?”

Half a dozen siege-class machina were gathered on a small ridge above them, lighting her up with targeting lasers. Autoguns and plasma cannons and missile batteries focused on Thundersaurus’s ruins.

But Ana’s eyes were locked on Ezekiel. Horror. Anguish. Rage. The picture of him lifting the pistol in that cell, aiming at her head.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

I hear the sound of thunder.

And then I hear nothing at all.

“You shot me…,” she breathed.

Cricket looked back and forth between Ana and the lifelike. “What?”

“Get him away from me,” she gasped.

Gunfire. Six bullets, blasting the asphalt in a neat semicircle around her.

“Settle down there, missy,” the Preacher warned.

“Ana…,” Ezekiel pleaded.

“Get away from me!” she screamed.

The Preacher fired again into the air, hollering at the top of his lungs.

“EVERYBODY JUST CALM DOWN, GODDAMMIT!”

Silence rang as the shots faded, the bounty hunter nodding to himself as if satisfied. He holstered his pistol, waved the flamethrower at the wreckage, and spoke with a graveled voice.

“You might wanna crawl outta there, Snowflake. ’Less you want me to forget my manners and ventilate Miss Carpenter’s head. She’s still worth some creds dead, after all.”

The Titans turned their weapons on Ezekiel as the lifelike crawled from the wreckage. Their optics aglow, autogun barrels beginning to spin up.

“Operative, should we terminate?” the pilot asked.

“Negative,” the Preacher said. “All y’all, hold fire unless I spit an express kill order. This warrant is priority one. Board certified, you read me?”

“Roger that. Holding.”

The bounty hunter pulled off his gas mask, reached into the tattered remnants of his coat. Ana could see that his chest had been shredded by her shotgun blast, but she could make out metal beneath the flesh she’d minced. He fished around inside his pocket, stuffed a lump of synth tobacco into his cheek. Raised his flamethrower in Ezekiel’s direction.

“You just stay on your belly, Snowflake. I seen what fire done to your big sister back in Armada. So don’t move unless you fancy the smell of barbecue.”

Ana blinked the tears from her eyes, fear of the Preacher momentarily overcoming the rage and hate boiling in her head. She scoped Kaiser, still lying motionless in the dust. She spied her satchel close beside him, the glint of red on the thermex grenade inside it. But it was so far away….

She looked at the Preacher. Down the barrel of his pistol. She was back in that cell again. Blood on her hands. On her face. Her family in ruins all around her. Gabriel standing above her. Tousled blond hair and eyes like green glass. Myriad’s voice in the background, pleading with the lifelikes to stop. Uriel’s handsome face, now twisted and cruel, framed by long black hair. Hope’s eyes still filled with uncertainty despite the blood already on her hands. Faith, once Ana’s dearest friend, her stare now empty and cold.

And him.

“Why the waterworks, missy?”

Ana glared up at the bounty hunter, trying to push the tears back, punching and kicking. But they were too big. Too much. Looking at Ezekiel, the anguish on his face, the world opening up beneath her and dragging her down, down, down.

“Ana…,” he pleaded. “Let me explain….”

“Shut up!” Cricket shouted. “Haven’t you done enough?”

She couldn’t feel her skin. Couldn’t breathe. Everything. All of it. Lie after lie after lie. Curling up into a ball and wrapping her arms around her legs and listening as the fragments of her life shattered like bloodstained glass.

The Preacher looked from the broken girl to the almost-boy.

“Mmmf,” he grunted.

The bounty hunter spat into the dirt, flamethrower still trained on Ezekiel as he walked around to the other side of the wreckage. The machina pilots watched on impassively, scopes locked on Ana and Ezekiel, just a word away from unleashing murder. She wondered if that would be better. To close her eyes and listen to the bullets’ hymn.

Preacher tapped the side of his throat, brow creased in concentration.

“Nest, this is Goodbook. Repeat, Nest, this is Goodbook. Package secured, one bounty, one person of interest. All the trouble he’s caused me, I figure the tech boys might wanna take a peek inside this snowflake’s head. I’m gonna need evac from—”

The man blinked at a strange sound, turned to look behind him. There on the ground, sitting on his haunches and wagging his tail, was a rusty metal dog. He’d looked almost real once, but his fur had started wearing off a year back, so Eve had stripped him to the metal and spray-painted him in an urban-camo color scheme instead. He looked skeletal now, all plasteel plates and hydraulics.

She liked him better that way.

In his mouth was a red cylinder. It was marked with a small skull and crossbones, stamped with the word EXPLOSIVE. It had been jury-rigged like a grenade, and, clever dog that he was, the blitzhund had figured out how to pull the pin.

His eyes were glowing blood red.

“Kaiser…,” Ana whispered.

“Wuff,” the dog said.

BOOM.

The thermex ignited in a blistering halo, the explosion near deafening. Blasted with dust and heat, Ana closed her eyes against the shockwave, Cricket bowled over beside her. She climbed to her knees, screaming Kaiser’s name as the fireball rose high into the sky. Black smoke churned, metallic scraps falling from the sky like rain, the Preacher lying wide-eyed and motionless, the lower half of his body blown away.

“Hostile! Hostile!” the Tarantula pilot cried. “Ghost ’em!”

Ana felt an impact at her back, strong arms around her. Ezekiel picked her up and dragged her behind the truck’s wreckage as the machina opened fire. She was screaming Kaiser’s name, tears in her eyes as the bullets flew, smashing through the hull, thunk-thunk-thunking into the engine block. Cricket ran for cover, skidding behind the wreckage as the air filled with thundering booms. The Titans and Juggernauts were moving to flank them, feet and tank treads crunching in the dirt, only seconds away from a clear shot.

Only seconds till they were dead.

“Ana, I’m sorry,” Ezekiel whispered.

A Juggernaut loomed out of the sun. Autoguns raised.

Cricket stood in front of her, trying to shield her with his tiny body.

“Get away from her!”

Ana stared down the barrel and saw peace. Quiet. The Eve in her raging against it with every fiber of their being. And then she heard the clink of glass. A soft curse. A hand wrapped in a pink plastic glove reached out from inside the Thundersaurus’s wreckage.

“Stop,” Lemon whispered.

The Juggernaut shuddered. Flinched as if struck by an invisible hand. Sparks burst from its optics as Lemon Fresh closed her fingers into a fist and, with a thought, with a gesture, with a word, fried every circuit and relay inside its metal shell.

Lemon crawled from the wreckage, bullets punching through the metal around her. Brow dripping blood, eyes narrowed. Arms held out, palms upturned, fingers curling into claws as the scream tore from her throat.

“STOP!”

An electric concussion. A static shockwave, tasted more than felt. The machina around them shuddered. Rocked back on their suspensions or wobbling on unsteady legs, pilots screaming as they were cooked alive inside their cockpits. And with a series of awful metallic groans, the hiss of frying relays and bursts of sparks, the big bots tottered like marionettes with cut strings and crashed dead and still onto the dirt.

Every.

Single.

One.

Ana stared at her bestest.

Dumbfounded.

Incredulous.

“…Lem?”

The girl dropped her hands to her sides. Dragging in great, ragged breaths. And Ana suddenly understood. All of it made sense.

All of it…

Machines had only been fritzing when Lemon was around. But Lem had always been out of sight, or Ana too busy to notice exactly what she was doing. Too busy rocking with the Goliath in WarDome. Too focused on the Fridgeboys in Tire Valley. Too intent on the Preacher’s blitzhund in the Armada subway. But Lem had been almost out cold when they’d arrived at Babel, and Ana’s power hadn’t worked because…

Because it wasn’t her power.

“…trashbreed.”

“…deviate.”

“…abnorm.”

Lemon lifted Popstick with a growl. “Don’t call her that.”

Ana thought it had been her. Lying there on the WarDome floor, holding out her hand and screaming and thinking she’d become something more, when all the time…

This whole time…

“No…,” Ana breathed.

Lemon looked at Ana, eyes brimming with tears, her voice trembling.

“I’m sorry, Riotgrrl,” she said. “I…I tried to tell you so many times….”

Lies.

Upon lies.

Upon lies.

And this, the last, was just enough to break her.